Mark of the Winter King
by DNA
Summary: Foreshadowing in the Redemption series--a winter's solstice brings time for introspection: no gift comes without a price.
1. A Solstice Reflection

The Mark of the Winter King—Part 1 

--Caledonian Foothills at the foot of the highland passes

--Winter's Solstice 183 CE

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--as a note: The "fort " of this story is actually Inchtuthill (Pinnata Castra), located in the reaches of Scotland (Alba—the name during this particular era); Arbeia is a fort along Hadrian's Wall (Wallsend, I believe its called, nowadays); Eboracum is York; Cattaractonium is Catterick

--one last thing-this story was written on a whim, a group of "Christmas Stories" posted on the Gladiator SKG forum board.  Winter's Solstice, and the peace that surrounds this time of year sort of prompted me to write this.  However, if this tid-bit of writing is confusing, it's b/c it fits into the cannon I'm following for the Redemption series I'm continuously working on.  Frankly, this part hasn't happened yet, and is a long way off in coming.  Be warned, there is some smut…it's very Victorian (i.e., hardly gratuitous) in presentation, and I did try to fit it into a wider framework of story.  Hopefully, all will make sense by Part 3.  Cheers!;) 

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The world spoke to her of darkness, stillness, and night, gazing out as she was upon a landscape of blanketed, snowy peace, lurid moonlight and ice-encased branches to the trees beyond the enclosure.  It made her think of the way moonshine would appear bathing the opaque waters of the mysterious ocean--pearly, a river of ivory and silken paths wavering and transient upon the mirror of skies' reflections.  

Cold and crisp, the world, the night and everything in it seemed made of frost, sculpted of crystalline starlight, and kissed by the purity of the highlands. The rough hairs of the thick woolen blanket scratched against her skin when she pulled it tighter about her shoulders. The blanket was warm, and she hadn't wanted to throw anything more elaborate on simply to make a trip to the latrines, out across the insular courtyard from the praetorium's sleeping quarters, down the other end of the pillared hall.

When the urgency of her bladder had been relieved, breathing deeply of frozen alpine purity to cleanse her senses of the less than pleasant odor of the latrine, it was then, walking back past the colonnades lining the inner corridor, the utter beauty of the night simply caught her.  It was a subtle thing, that beauty, easy enough to miss--simply pass on by. Understandable, given that the temperature, even in the pallid light of winter's sun, could be just barely tolerable here in the coniferous heights of Britannia's far reaches beyond the Wall. 

She stopped in her brisk progress, then. The immediate thought in her mind--of getting back under the thick down covers of the bed, snuggling next to the welcome, solid warmth of the other body she knew was there--simply draining away. Overcome, at that moment, by the absolute stillness in the out-tide hours from midnight. She stopped to gaze upon the courtyard's arboreal decor, that, come spring, would be awash with blossoms from the elderberries hedging the perimeter, pink and white lace-flowers of delicate crabapple and cherry painting a canopy of floral allure over the cross-walks. What she saw, in the immediacy of the winter-encased present, was an orchard cloaked in hibernal timelessness and hyperborean canescence.

Mindless, unawares, she leaned against one of the granite-carved columns, watching the vapor of her breath curdle into steam, retreat like the remnants of a lost wraith, into the wonderland of fey-white mist, ebony night, and alabaster flakes piled high along the eastern side of the exterior hall. The branches of the trees were like a darkened hag's fingers against the already black, star-strewn sky, covered by thin tracings of snow outlining their skeletal forms, and adorned with winter's grace of diamond-cut icicles.  The pinnacled, inverted formations, slick with frozen moisture, made her think of the spiny vertebrate from animals she had dissected over the years, or perhaps the jagged canines of a predator--like the wolf's teeth hanging from the leather thong of her...lover's neck.

She still marveled at that, mulling the thought through her mind, savoring, as one would the delicious flavor of honeyed strawberries. The invernal solstice was a time for reflection, inward examination of one's actions throughout the year, or so her mother's people believed, and she knew full well, Romans preserved such traditions in their version of mid-winter's observance.  

She could imagine, standing, staring out into the snowy glade of this courtyard, how cities from Eboracum to Londinium, Tarraco to Rome, Alexandria to Pergamum would be decked out in celebration of the dark-shadow of the year. Mid-winter festivities to fight off mid-winter's disquiet--servants and masters switching places, women heading the household, lighting eternal embers to hold back the lengthened nights of cold and chill.  Sprigs of fir, evergreen branches, holly and ivy would be hanging from the rafters of her brother's town-home in Arbeia. Closing her eyes, she could see in her mind the warm ambience of Cassius and Imona's villa, their three children running about in the crowd they invited every year, from the townsfolk and fort soldiers, to their triclinium,. Laughter and tapping feet, clapping hands in time with the joyous music of harps, pipes, and bohdrans, dancing and singing would fill her brother's, and his wife's, dining hall, bantering talk amongst the men, the chatter of women would resound throughout the feast.  

Nemhyn sighed, taking in the chill pinch of frosty air, the comfort of memory filling her mind momentarily with images of joyous love and human celebration.  A stirring wind moved through the _praetorium's courtyard, disturbing small flurries from the towering branches of the trees, their ice-leaden boughs creaking woodenly, smaller limbs snapping under the weight of frozen, invasive moisture. She shivered responsively in the sharp, sudden gust, pulling the blanket even tighter across her shoulders and body, feeling the wind lift the strands of her unbound hair, brush her cheeks with the chill kiss of icy-pure breath. Absently, she frowned, hoping the orderlies she had spoken with before she had finally left the hospital only a few hours ago, understood her insistence for maintaining the braziers in the wards of the infirmary through the night.  _

Somewhere, in the vast, wild darkness of Alba, beyond the newly occupied fort, a wolf howled, mournful and long, speaking a primordial language of coniferous slopes, remote mountain valleys inaccessible, protected from human depravity and despoilment, isolated in domains of rocky heights and wind-driven peaks.  The lupine sound echoed her mood, strange and melancholy, like the stillness preserved on this mid-winter night. In a place at the far-end of the Empire, this fort--with twenty-five hundred men assigned to fight a protracted campaign carried over from the year before. The year the Picti had finally broken through the Wall. Long foreseen by her mother, Britannia had come under invasion. Her father, Antius Crescens, had mounted a desperate defense. Assigned as acting governor in the absence of Albinus, who had pulled precious legionnaires from the island, staking his own claim to the seat of Caesar, the general of the VI Victrix faced formidable odds on an island at war, one province in an Empire three men claimed to rule.

And now, here, on this mid-winter night, the heroes of Britannia's defense were stationed-a detachment from the elite _Ala Primae Sarmatarum assisting a vexillation of the __VI Victoria Victrix--hardened legionnaires from the citizen-soldiers, and a wing of equally hardened, quarrelsome and dangerous steppe warriors. It was an uneasy truce between the  legionary vexillation, in residence at the opposite end from the barracks of the Sarmati cavalry.  Each unit served her father from afar, but on the field, citizen-soldier and steppe-warrior singly followed the command of only one man. A man who held the loyalty of the wild horsemen, expected their obedience, relied on their courage, and humbly accepted their trust in his leadership with the same unflinching determination he commanded over the legionary soldiers.  __Ironic, she mused, expulsing an audible breathe into the silent winter evening, given that he no longer considered himself of the legions._

Artos--they called him--the Great Bear. A man who had sacrificed one name to the sands of the Arena--a name great in its own right--until the name had become tainted with the whisper of treason.  An accusation of usurpation contrived by an inherently corrupt young Emperor who, the few of Rome's elite who dared whisper, was said to have murdered his own father.  Well, if the gossip mill constantly alive in the Eternal City was right on one count, Commodus was indeed dead--had been, now, for the last year and a half. 

Maximus, it was said, had died that day too.

Nemhyn, staring across the moon-ivoried courtyard of snow and ice, surrounded in the shadows of the night, and the chill of winter, felt the corner of her mouth twist into a characteristic wry expression.

Nemhyn knew better, of course. As did Marcus Aurelius' daughter, as did Nemhyn's own mother.

And doubtless, of them all--so did Maximus. 

Reflexively, her facade grew inward once more, enigmatic as she studied the lines of the smooth, granite pillars bordering the courtyard. It was difficult to tell, in the obscuring darkness of the night, where the snow's white pallor, piled at the bases of the heavy columns, gave way to the gray, granulated surfaces of the grooved supports.

There was a thought in that somewhere--a deeper meaning if she so fancied to pursue that observance. So troubled to disturb the temporary peace she had found here, in the courtyard, in this remote fort, at the furthest edge of the civilized world anyone knew, on this midwinter evening. Something about blurred lines, and a disquieting realization of shifting patterns--the telling markers of station, heritage, bloodlines, and citizenry by which peoples used to define themselves. And consequently, to relate to one another. 

Men who came to this island--a gem to her mind, set in the Western ocean--arrived from all over the Empire.  And not a few from beyond the Empire, as the Sarmati demonstrated. Generations had settled here, for almost a century and a half. Long enough for families--Roman families, the families from the tribes, lineages originating from Hispania to Egypt--to have established, with near permanance, roots on this island. Britannia. They--these peoples--melded and merged, settled into a way of life--bloodlines combining to born new generations in the way of humanity. 

Where, then, did one stop calling themselves Thracian, or Greek, Latin, or simply Roman. Where, and when, did one become suddenly..._A Briton.  _

Too many paradoxes for her mind to puzzle out in an evening, too many disturbing thoughts. Perhaps it was because of the opposing forces in her own life-daughter of a Brigantine queen and a Roman general--people's, who by all rights, ought to have been the bitterest of enemies. She was a woman, but she practiced medicine--serving a quasi-role no woman brought up in a family any less eccentric than hers would have allowed. Brought up on an island viewed closer to barbarian than enlightened for the liberties it allowed its women, whose reputation for once having been the center of Druidic arts was only rivaled by its reputation for fueling a rebellion amongst the native northern tribes at least once in every generation.  

The Picti had claimed this island as their home for as long as her mother's people had, if not longer. By all rights, this was their land. They had every right to fight for it, to win it back from the stricture of the Eagles. Yet, families--children from Roman heritages and native British--lived south of the Wall, who would grow up--as she did--inheriting a double lineage.  In that case, what legacy was hers, from Britannia and from Rome.

When did one cease calling themselves…a Briton then, and become Roman. The Sarmati, she knew, would name themselves British before they would ever align--or in their eyes--malign themselves with any identity likening them to their Latin overseers. Even on the day, 25 years from now, when they would lay down their swords and lances, were awarded a seal of bronze, promising citizenship and the privileges of Romanization, they would still insist on their individual ancestry.

And Maximus...she shook her head, perplexed.  Well, one would never have guessed his lineage.  _Fand, and the blood of Hibernian heroes in the veins of a Spaniard, she thought in the same irony characterizing the frame of her ponderences tonight. _

This really was a disquieting notion, better left for philosophers.  She truly hated wrapping her mind around conundrums having no straightforward answer. Medicine, of course, contained its own complexities, but at least they were tied up in the notion of the natural sciences.  Well, when men didn't try to bog the actuality of practice in far-fetched theory, and strange, unsubstantiated superstitions. Nemhyn had her own thoughts on disease and infection, whether it was truly sacrilege to dissect a human body--none of which, she was convinced, had to do with imbalanced humors, tainted pneuma, or insulting the gods and practicing black magic.

Far better to let her mind be lulled by the peace of a mid-winter's night, allow the chill to brush her face and hands, even as the rest of her body remained wrapped in warmth from the blanket. 

A step on flag-stones of the floor, a quiet 'shush' of fabric from behind, spurred her to startled motion, and she moved abruptly back into the shadow of the pillar, trying to fade out of moonlight and snowy, starry night. 

Chances were, the intruder to her silent peace was neither dangerous nor threatening, but leaning against the concealing side of the column, she could feel the chill of the stone against her cheek, and was reminded she was one woman of relatively few (the others being mostly the fort workers) in a contained fort of over two-thousand men. 

She was on familiar terms with most of them, at least the officers. Too, most of them knew, by now anyway, of her association with the man they all followed as Lucius Artorius Castus. Whether or not they all approved, however, was a different story, but on Britannia, certain protocols governing etiquette between men and women had been relaxed for decades. Not to mention that for every man--usually one of the soldiers in the legions raw from the home province of Italia--who condemned her behavior as being licentious and worthy of a camp follower, at least three would argue for her professional skill as a doctor, and another one for her fidelity. And of course there was always Publius, her fellow colleague in the hospital, whose own father had been a brehon judge of the Parisii. Fortunate he could quote the ten, or so, variances of law amongst the native Britons, allowing cohabitation of women and men under a legal standing. 

Still, one never knew in the night, who wandered corridors.  _I should speak for myself, the thought ringing through her head with mocking precision. But when it was a lone man—something in the heaviness of the step told her it was a man--coming upon a lone woman clothed, truth-be-told, in only a woolen blanket substituting as a make-shift mantle, circumstances could escalate from gruff politeness to an inconvenient encounter in no time.  _

She cursed under her breath hearing the progression of steps pause just on the other side of the pillar. 

"Nemhyn?" A puzzled voice reached her ears, low but audible, rumbling with masculine richness into the corridor's silent passage and the courtyard's snow-graced ambience.

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Part II: Mark of the Winter King 

Winter 183 CE

--Alba (Scotland)—foot of the highland passes/ legionary fortress of Pinnata Castra (Inchtuthill)

--Delves a little into the background of a Romanized Arthur—much credit goes to Linda Malcor's wonderful essays on Lucius Artorius Castus, and the unnamed heroes of Sarmatian conscripts he led in the salvaging of Roman Britain from 183-184 CE.  

--Maximus' character was just too good to kill off so easily at the end of the movie, and Malcor's essays offered inspiration for breathing new life into a poignant character and an age-old, dearly loved legend…

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Indeed, he had been watching her for sometime, standing there in the moonlight reflected off the snow blanketing the _praetorium's inner yard.  Watching the emotions play across a face whose austere beauty--pale and incisive with a slight crescent arch of a nose, prominent plains of her cheeks--seemed heightened in the stark setting of white-cold, frozen star-shine, and black ice glazing the trunks of the barren trees.  _

He'd fallen into bed earlier that evening, weary and exhausted, trying to forget the carnage of the afternoon. It didn't matter--blood, severed limbs--could not have been keener behind his closed lids if they had been scattered across the sleeping quarters. 

**_That afternoon…_**

Sopping with damp sweat steaming off his body from under the iron scale-plated cuirass, gore and slime covered every space of clothing or weaponry on his person.  Looking about him, in the icy-silence of that afternoon, he simply resembled every other man who had survived the failed ambush. The platinum blonde of Cyanus' hair caught the weakly shining rays breaking through the high branches sheltering the clearing. His officer was detailing, with another of the Sarmatian troopers, the damage to their own scout party--the lightly wounded, the badly wounded, and of course, the dead. 

The raven black gleam of Busephilus' coat guided him to where he'd lost his shield sometime during the melee, and been forced to dismount, freeing his noble stallion. Being atop a horse did not stand to his advantage when caught amongst flying arrows, screaming men, and a narrow clearing on a forested path shouldered between a sharp decline covered with trees, below, and marauding tribesmen above.  

His foot stubbed something covered in the mess of splattered, red-stained snow and begrimed mud, making him curse and stumble slightly, falling into Busephilus.  The large stallion sidled away with dancing hooves, flattening his ears, nickering in equine surprise to admonish the clumsiness of his master. Catching the unnerved stallion's loosened reigns, Maximus muttered a rather offhanded comment at the horse before patting the extrusive bones of the beast's velvet-soft muzzle, resting his forehead against the horse's smooth, broad expanse of cheek.  The tones of the stallion's muted whickering, pushing his nose into the man's hand, almost resembled the salient grumbling of a discontented friend, or a disgruntled spouse, convincing Maximus, yet again, the uncanny steed held some lofty equine opinions about the foolishness of his two-legged masters. 

His hand still rubbing around the horse's soft nares, it was at that moment Maximus looked down for the offending rock--he'd thought--to edge it out of his way. 

And felt his gorge rise. 

The object that had caused his break in balance--not a rock, but a dirty, bruised looking head, stump of a neck--was half buried by the mess of snow and wet filth littering the ground. Where remained the shattered evidence of the skeletal column, hung tatters of pink muscle and sloppy tendrils of flesh, bright with crimson evidence of recently spilled blood.

He was not a man easily overcome by the violence of battle. Too many years in the legions doing this same kind of thing; a couple too many years in arenas amusing mobs in a more intimate style of death-play. 

The side and back of the decapitated head was covered by a shock of matted looking orange-red hair, a beard just showing the first patchy signs of the richness that came with imminent manhood. Maximus knelt down, feeling the snow soak through the tough suede of his breeches, the cold making his knees ache. With a gloved hand, he reached out in a trancelike, disgusted fascination, turning the severed head over, looking on a face that was distorted into a final expression of surprise. The nose had been smashed in, leaving a gaping hollow, and what could have been the ground pulp of rotting fruit.  Socketed, dried blood, seeped around extant cartilage, scant, as most of it must have drained out into the ground. The eyes stared with the vacancy of emptied life, rolled back in the orbits of half-closed lids. 

The sallow, sickly wan cheeks were smooth, however. This raider had barely seen manhood, by appearance, still more a boy.  The fact this boy had been present in a wooded clearing, part of the company of rough, unkempt men who would have passed for lawless brigands in any other part of the civilized world, trying to overpower a party of some twenty-five trained and disciplined warriors--armored to the teeth--only reflected how little age influenced the actual demands of manhood in the harsh, brutal reality that was life.  It was that fact which made the ex-gladiator's insides gel into a sad, mournful regret. 

With the overlying masque of death upon the facade, what the boy might have looked like was difficult to discern. It didn't matter; this had been a boy; not a man, not a seasoned warrior. 

And this boy had died upon his, Maximus's sword--or one of his fellow troopers. 

He looked up from the severed head he handled, the waxen sunlight, catching, for an instant, the refraction off silvered embellishments from a legionnaire's breast plate across the clearing--a winged horse rearing at a five headed dragon. He watched the Roman soldier force two rag-garbed tribesmen to kneel in the snow, the threat of a bludgeon forestalling outright defiance, though both the prisoners barely cowered.  One had dirt-tangled blond hair, seemed younger, with dread-knots extending from his scalp. His companion, moving with the stiffness of pain, favored his arm to his chest, the disjointed angle of the man's shoulder giving away the reason. Maximus could see the injured one's face clearer; he was more in the light of a receding sun, shadows of the trees lengthening across the clearing, the chill of the winter night impending, with a biting wind starting to rise, scattering dried brush about the forest floor, a cloud-riddled sky overhead, promising more snow.  

Maximus-who men knew on this island as Artos--might as well been gazing at the face of any grizzled sheep-herder tending their flocks under a close eye and a readied staff, from the shale-gray cliffs of the Severen inlet to the south, up along the rocky knolls of moss and lichen, spanning the eastern coast of the Wall, prominent above the Northern Sea.  

_Old men and boys, came his embittered realization. It was hard to feel any sense of accomplishment outside of having survived the intended ambush.  _

His regret transformed to a simmering ire—pointless in that there was little he could do about it.  Standing, he grimaced at the way his knees cracked in protest. Glancing across the forested space to his chief-officer, the ex-gladiator--once more a leader of men--saw the realization of his finding mirrored in Cyanus' furious blue gaze.  Saw, too, the haggard anguish in the brawny man's shadowed eyes, the fact Batrades—prince of the Royal Iazyges—ought to have been in this wooded place, here at this moment, performing the duties Cyanus now found himself doing.

Batrades. He would not think of Batrades right now.  Later, when he had time to himself. 

The man who had been nicknamed the Great Bear, grasping his grisly finding by the hair on the scalp, walked from his stallion's side across the clearing, pale shadows of wind-driven clouds sliding high above, darkening a winter landscape of dull white and muddled browns and grays.  He passed Cyanus, clapping the Sarmati warrior on a chain-mailed shoulder with gruff affection, sharing his fellow officer's unspoken sorrow as his own. Hoping, solemn, as he buried the head by an old, hollowed oak—twisted limbs leafless for far longer than this single winter--if the boy had a brother or a father among his fellow raiders, they were also numbered among dead.  

The burning rage that could drive the desire for vengeance was a consuming inferno, leaving nothing in its wake but ashes, an empty vessel, once the deed of avenged blood was accomplished.  

He ought to know, once driven by that same craving for retribution.  No, certainly it was a better thing if this boy's kin had either died with him in this raid, or the year before, on the banks of the River Douglas.  

Maximus. Artos--the Great Bear, piled a last bit of clumped, soggy earth into the pitiful hole housing the decapitated head at the foot of the ancient tree, where erosion had worn away the soil, exposing the decayed pith of contorted roots. Deliberately ignoring the odd, covert glances his actions drew from the other men—Picti prisoner, Roman legionaire, or Sarmati horsemen—he completed his task, rubbing the slightly acerbic scented soil between bare hands, inhaling the essence of damp and cold, mixed with tracings of dead wood moss and foliage. 

Few, if any, of his soldiers, could have guessed at the distant, remembered sorrow throbbing across the inner sanctum of his heart in that moment.  He once handled the effigies of his wife and son like that, with grimed fingers, after escaping the arms of death one more time following the savagery of battle. Giving thanks that he might be allowed to go home—an indefinite hope. That Marcus Aurelius, when he'd still been alive, would finally grant him that release. Ride, with welcoming joy, up the causeway in the golden sunlight of his farm, hidden away in the wheat-rich hills above Trujillo. Anticipating the solid weight of Selene in his arms, his son's laughter warming, easing the rawness in heart.  

Marcus Aurelius had been dead now for almost four years. Destruction—the charred corpses of his wife and son mangled and swinging in a breeze redolent with burnt flesh, imbued with the sickly-sweet scent of fresh blood--was the greeting left for him at the archway to his farm's outer yard. 

It was an old pain, filled with distant remorse, and it usually passed in a few heartbeats.  

It still left the taste of cinders in his mouth, a bile in his soul, when it came. 

Never far behind that pain, though, was the novel, reluctant joy he'd somehow uncovered, here on this distant shore, at the edge of the Western Empire. Unexpected, given that he had sought only the final peace of his Elysium, upon Commodus' death.  

Not just peace, but home. 

He remembered vision wavering, Quintus' voice, falling—oblivion.  And then…

The vibrancy of afterlife filling senses no longer imprisoned by the crude flesh of mortality.  

It was only later, he was to learn there were other states men might inhabit resembling death.  When a body lost too much blood, organs started shutting down, slowing.  But the last to go, as Nemhyn once explained, was the functioning of heart or lung. A man might slip into unconsciousness, breathing so shallow, unless careful examination was performed--respiration, pulse—went unnoticed.  

She'd offered that explanation in those early days, one evening, traversing the roads of Italia with her mother, in the guise of wandering peddlers, their own pilgrimage and purposes having brought them to the Eternal City. Offered an unsentimental comfort, in that time shortly after she and her mother had pulled him back from that final threshold. Initially, he'd been a dispirited and thankless convalescent at best. It hadn't helped learning of the disastrous fallout left in the trail of Commodus' death—the Guard tightening their grasp on power, and Lucilla's son paying the last and final price in the demise of the Antonii. 

Nemhyn--unsentimental, and unpitying, but not uncompassionate. Reflexively trying--in the manner of her nature-to show him, in spite of humanity's foibles and tragedies, life could sometimes still be possible. Lucilla had tried that too, by re-awakening the ideal of a dream he'd believed dead. Truth-be-told, Nemhyn had also attempted that—eventually. 

But first, she had tried laughter during the early days of their contact traveling through Italia. Through Italia, trying to get back to Britannia, Nemhyn related a story of how changing customs on the isle, influencing preferences for burial over cremation, had caused unanticipated problems in recent years.  Sometimes, common-folk—the herders and farmers of the island's populace—often did not have access to the expertise of classically trained physicians more affluent classes might. A peasant witch, the ancient midwife, sometimes even the village priest--once taught a spattering of the cryptic Druidic lore long ago--knew little more about bodily signs between life and death than the cattle-tender.  Chances were, the cattle tender being younger, with less impaired hearing and eyesight, probably could distinguish physical subtleties more accurately. 

_In the absence of obvious breathing, immediately audible heartbeats, or indications of movement, persons are declared deceased, and fit for the rituals of last rites, Nemhyn had detailed, ill-disguised humor shining in her eyes. __Sometimes, though, the person isn't actually dead, just...not quite with the living. And they regain conscious awareness in a few days.  It happens with some types of head injuries that don't go bad.  _

He remembered she'd said that last like explaining how some types of meat go rotten if they weren't salted and smoked properly. It had taken him little time journeying with Nemhyn and her mother, to understand their take on occurrences most persons viewed as too profane, or uncomfortable for casual discussion—like deceased loved ones returning from the dead—usually warranted a bald, and sometimes ribald, observation of surrounding circumstances.

_Then the stories of how Cunolinex's newly dead grandmother arriving at the doorstep of her family start flying all over the countryside, she had continued, undeterred by his surly comment, stating his disinterest in her tale. __Wearing her burial adornment--probably the finest garments she ever wove--they are now covered in mud, clay, and rotting plant roots. She nearly sends the entire family, peacefully dining on their evening meal, into their own early graves as she rails at the top of voice, cursing their future generations, next year's crops, the new season of lambs, and anything else her poor, addled senses haven't yet conceived.  The family thinks she's a ghost. She insists she's simply their mis-treated, and readily forgotten grandmother, who is hungry, cold, aching sore, and has a horrible knot on her head.  Had Cunolinex not been playing dice for the countless time with his friends, when he **ought to have been collecting water for the evening baths, his decrepit old grandmother would not have had to suffer the arduous chore of carrying the impossibly heavy buckets down to the river at dusk.  He should have known with her aching joints and failing vision, toting a load far to heavy for her old back, she would trip and fall, bashing her head on a boulder she hadn't been able to make out in the darkness.**_

Then, she awakens with a head throbbing like the thunder of the High Ones, to find herself in a darkness she first thinks in Cerridwen's Well, only to make out, after long hours of panic and smelling rotten vegetation, that it's in fact, her own grave.  **Without-- mind you--the stone sarcophagus her family vowed they would bury her in, and her husband's favorite gold neck-ring. **

_That's usually when, Nemhyn had concluded, trying to contain a voice shaking with rising mirth, __the family—a little guilt ridden by this point--starts to perceive, perhaps on the off-chance, this is no angered ghost, but the rather miraculously resurrected, very mortal, and very indignant familial matron. And if her expostulations haven't convinced them by this point, grandmother's threat of going to the local judge, and accusing her family of violating her burial testimony, usually does.  _

He remembered his response to her jocular attempt at narrative came out as a curtly trenchant remark, dark words about her insensitivity to human suffering, and his explicit wish to be left alone for the remainder of their journey to Ianua. His brooding temper was usually implied with enough force to intimidate the most unflappable spirit.

Or so he'd figured, until meeting Nemhyn and her formidable mother, nearly two years ago. 

Standing here in the middle of Alba's dense forest--the bite of winter's teeth prescient on his skin, chilling the sweat from his hair and neck--the hustling clamor of his troops reached his ears, their forms dimming in the receding winter light. That afternoon, as he swung his leg over Busephilus' back, amid harsh shouts from his men directed at the few bedraggled survivors composing the prison line, he pondered for a countless time, how wrong he often was in puzzling out women's natures.  

He heard those same men who had been threatening the Picti bare moments ago—Roman legionaire and Sarmati warrior—subsequently encourage their own wounded with gruff words couched in masculine bravado, belying much more than the contained emotion any hardened soldier would ever admit to openly. 

"If you even think to look anywhere but straight ahead you balless painted northerner, you might as well consign your sweet eyes to your gods, and hope the heavens can show mercy for a blinded slave!" A coarse voice, menacing. 

Maximus, about to turn back in his saddle with a glare of warning reminding the trooper to restrain his avowing threats, heard the same-said man, moments later, plead in tone of tight anguish. "Come on Gaius, stay with a little longer.  The arrow missed your heart. If you dare pass out, I'm going to tell all the ladies at Belinus' tavern, the next time we're on leave in Eboracum, how you swooned like a virgin on her wedding night from a mere scratch." 

These were familiar utterances--beseechments and promises, caveats and repartees--he'd heard in different forms, in different places of the Empire, with different men, as a general and a slave--one too many times over the years.  

Now, he was no longer a general, nor a slave.  What he was…

He had no idea.  He supposed simply a leader of men.  The amalgam he commanded was peculiar—mostly Sarmati horsemen, but legionary tribunes paid homage to him, as did (disturbing as it was), the British nobility.  He was…

…_the Winter King, the last syllable of the word ending as a drawn out sigh--a young girl's childish, murmuring giggle, carried by the glacial wind, upon the dry susurration of left-over leaves cloaking winter barren branches. _

A shiver ran, involuntary, down his spine like icy-sharp knives, hearing that voice.  Something of the man's disquiet must have communicated itself to his stallion, as the imposing black's ears twitched, and Busephilus snorted, giving a single, uneasy toss of a gallant, chamfron-adorned head. The invernal silence of the winter wood persisted, with no more intrusion of that eerie whisper, filled by a monotonous trudge of booted feet and hoofs plodding through snow-soaked mud.  The company proceeded in that state for sometime, a dank splash of slushy detritus, an occasional profanity or outraged whinny erupting when horse and human slipped on the less than even ground. 

Cyanus had galloped up from behind, just as they came in sight of the fortress, leaving the confines of the timberland, where the way opened to flatter, treeless bluffs—winter gray as the slated sky above--and just as barren, but no longer hampering site and movement.  On his big strawberry roan, the cavalryman looked like some grand impression of Ares come to life, scale armor plated in a dazzling array of gold-discs, his helmet catching the scarce remaining rays like a miniature iron sun.  

"There are spirits about on the wind tonight, Great Bear. They speak of kings and wars, heroes from long ago."  The Sarmatian's Latin had a thick resonance, lending an angular, stilted bent to the end of his phrases. 

"Then you hear more than I, Cyanus. All it told me was that I am very cold, and I have a great urge for a warm wash of ale, and some roasted portions of deer."  Not exactly true, but his misgiving was more often communicated through posture and expression than voice.  He tried, belatedly to wipe the furrow he felt forming upon his forehead. 

Cyanus, too observant a man to miss any indication of his superior commander's anxiety, weighted his heavy sapphire gaze upon the other man.  "You heard, too. I can see that.  Batrades used to say it was Tabiti's voice, whispering from the realm of shades.  I cannot say if it was true or not—about Tabiti's voice.  But tonight--," the burly horseman's words faded, growing rough, his eyes sliding away from Maximus' face, focusing too carefully on the rising gates from the imposing watchtowers of the fort straight ahead. "Tonight, I thought I heard the voice of Batrades." 

Maximus could only throw his privately suffering officer a brief, pained look of his own—a reflection of the naked loss all would feel should Batrades' life give out. 

The shouts of welcome from the fort garrison, an inquiry as fellow soldiers greeted the returning scouting party, broke the moment, moving both men back into the confusion of their fellow warriors and horses. What had been shared mourning with a close comrade became, once more, the bustle of a fort where the injured needed tending, prisoners needed tallying, and messages needed to be sent south to the Antonine line on the morrow. 

"He's not dead yet," was all Maximus could get out stiffly, lamely, to his own ears, before both men were called to their respective duties. 

Someone, a hospital orderly, asked Maximus where to put the wounded prisoners—the penitentiary or the infirmary. An office clerk, weedy in appearance and high strung, whose knobby throat protruded distractingly when he spoke, had been searching frantically for the camp prefect, or the highest ranked officer all afternoon. He had the misfortune of finding Cyanus instead, who growled at the man with a near bestial viciousness that almost had the poor weasel soiling himself before Maximus could intervene. 

He didn't feel like the Great Bear, nor very much like a leader of men. He simply thanked the gods Calius, a trusted tribune of the VI, offered to face the couriers waiting in the commandant's office, seeking an audience before the solstice's banquet.  He wasn't sure the kind of a celebration his men were pending on, but two fort-laborers hauled cider vats down the principal lane of the fortress, toward the U-shaped officers' headquarters in the center of the stronghold.

Handing off Busephilus to a groom with one last rub to the horse's sleek chin groove, he just hoped the music and carousing which usually extended into early hours of the sun's next rising, wouldn't distract him from the remaining administrative tasks he still needed to finish. He tried to focus on minutiae, walking by a grouping of stone-walled barracks siding the road, their colorless facades featureless and uniform in the winter twilight. Communicae for reinforcements, four of the horses had gone lame over the late fall—one slain in the attempted ambush. There was the potential one of the Picti captives was of royal blood, and he needed to start thinking of a possible way of enacting a truce…

And there was Batrades—his blood-brother; his battle-brother; his shadow and his dark reflection.  The one man who knew, of a handful of others, the ex-gladiator's dismal influence on the Sarmatian exile to Britannia so many years ago.  The once-leader of the Royal-Iazyges had found, somewhere in his heart, a unity with a man who had been once-leader of the Northern Legions.  Most of all, they had each found a difficult, but profound friendship. 

Maximus—who was Artos to all of the men serving in a winter campaign, fighting a people Rome gave up on trying to subdue over a century ago--sat alone in the chief commander's study, enshrouded by the early winter darkness, with a flickering lamp suspended from a chubby-faced, bronze Eros balanced on one foot, candlelight glinting off a massive maple-wood desk. Staring, but not seeing, the pile of parchment, the inkwell and ivory-worked stylus, the hand-sized kit of official seals, and melted wax.  

Wearied and heart-sore, of twenty men, five were wounded, and one was dead, not to mention the eight, or so, Picti assailants.  _Old men and boys, the bitter thought came again. He was sick of wasting good soldiers._

And he was sick for Batrades.  

There, at his maple-wood desk, an engraved impression of leaves carved around the cornered edges--a gift from Ulpius Marcellus when the fort had been newly refurbished back in the late summer—he simply wept. 

It was a quiet, muffled and torn sound, not overly tear-filled. A man's weeping. 

While music filtered in on the draft of snowy air seeping through the shuttered windows of the study, men's laughter with women's merry voices, his hushed lament continued. What audible impression of his grief was lacking came through in the occasional spasm shaking the powerful expanse of his shoulders, couched in leather fringe ornamenting the arm sockets of his iron-scale breastplate. Only twice had he done this in his life. Once, when he'd come upon the bodies of his wife and son; the last, when he almost lost Nemhyn to a poisoned blade meant for him, back in the spring.

This was the third.

Like a quiet prayer, the sort men don't even know they make in the deep, unacknowledged recesses of their hearts, her voice reached out to him.  "Is this the way you decide to spend the hours of a winter's gathering? Holed up in the _principa, away from the feasting, music, and dancing, mourning the work you still have to do?" It shouldn't have been there, that voice, lilting with melodious huskiness, and always, that tinge of dry pragmatism.  _

She was south, along the more settled fortresses of the Hadrian divide, attending the hospital at Corstopitum.  Having never left the side of Batrades when the prince had been brought back on a wagon hauling the wounded nearly a fortnight ago.  Hauling the dead--to Corstopitum.

Everyone thought the dauntless prince of the Sarmati had been…dead, that is. Or at least…dying. Everyone except for Nemhyn, who had seen surgery performed on abdominal wounds, in those years of travel with her mother, during their expedition to the East. Publius had called her mad.  Nemhyn, in a lashing tone, and a furnace blast of temper he'd been on the other end of often enough, replied with a succinct lambasting to her colleague. A certain _Sushruta and an allusion to ants made up most of her impassioned rejoinder._

And suddenly, here she was, leaning, one hip raised to half sit on the edge of the desk, opposite him, her arms crossed over her breast. In the midst of his quiet release, he hadn't heard her enter the room, and wondered if she was a figment of his need, taken physical shape, and so summoned here as a comfort to himself. 

Selene had come to him like that once, that second time returning to Trujillo. Her form, though, had resonated with Immortal possession, whereas, Nemhyn, here before him, at this moment, evinced only a thankfully mortal flavor—the smudges under her eyes, a streak of dirt across one graceful cheekbone.  The flush upon her pale façade where the chill wind of evening scorched across her exposed skin drained out winter-faded freckles. Garbed as one of the Sarmati women, in a thigh-length jerkin of soft felt and worked leather, brocaded with a rich weaving of glass-beads at the edges, amber at the neck, her trousers were the same supple suede, a pale brown, blending with the intricate bead work of her boots. Hair bound in a knot at her nape was covered for utility's sake rather than modesty. He could see traces of moisture-hued tendrils, the color of russet leaves in the late autumn, plastered to her temples from underneath the scarf, trying to escape with wiry, frazzled defiance. A woolen cloak retained the heat of her body in the winter cold. 

It was obvious she had ridden overland, and at a rapid pace.       

Undoing the fastening of her cloak, she leaned forward across the desk, her eyes shining above the falcon's arch of her nose, like sunlight dappling the brown and green expanses of Britannia's sedge-covered meadows. 

"You know, I peeked in the window of the _scholae before I came here, thinking you would be with the other officers. You really do have an odd manner of celebrating," The scolding was marked by mild teasing. _

He didn't apologize for the tears she found him shedding; although, like any man, no matter how trusted the woman, there was always some measure of embarrassment when caught in the middle of emotional outpourings. 

He cleared his throat once, running a hand through springy, waving hair that curled at the neck, over his forehead, often an annoying disarray getting into his eyes.  "How-," he rasped losing his voice at the first go.  "How did you know to come, tonight. Right now, to be here, at this moment, when I needed you so badly."

Her responsive tenderness melted the previous banter in her initial greeting. "I didn't," she admitted, softly, so simple, with a small, self-minimizing shrug. She grinned quickly, then. A flash, and it was gone, but her words carried its jesting essence. "I figured you would be with the rest of the men, contributing no source of trouble for the available females by taking advantage of the mistletoe hanging from the ceiling. But you weren't, so I looked here."

"No, I…I didn't feel quite up to commiserating tonight."  

In the darkened room, illuminated only by the one suspended lamp catching the deep browns of the maple-wood desk, the clean silhouette of her features were captured in flame light and shadow.  Her eyes, though, were what disarmed him, luminous in their feeling. 

"Why were you weeping?" she asked with serene gentleness. 

"Why does any man weep," he returned, self-contempt hardening his tone. She didn't recoil from it.  She never had.  She merely shook her head once—voiceless condolence--and continued to peer at him steady and somber.

"Because," he barreled on in a sudden, agitated vehemence, "I lead men, and they die under my command! Because…because I see no benefit from expending our resources up in these gods' forsaken highlands, calling this a war, when the _almighty Empire,"—that said with a truly caustic emphasis--,"can't even decide on her own ruler!"_

"Because retribution cannot be used for the excuse of invasion! If Rome wants to make a point of her strength to barbarians who dared the arrogance of incursion, with an Empire who couldn't overcome her own strife long enough to stabilize her borders, then the Eagles shouldn't be using the men I lead!" 

She was so still, lying across the surface of the desk like that, on crossed elbows, gazing up at him with an intensity—her own scalding sorrow--that gave away the assumed casualness of her posture.  The tension in her bearing was more than an echo of his grief.  What shone her eyes was the deep loyalty, and courage of an indomitable heart--the love for her motherland. A forgotten province at the edge of the known Empire, yet the clean winds and misted towering peaks were the breath of life in her lungs, the numerous rivers and streams carving hidden paths through moor, and hidden glen--the milk of her veins.

"Because," he continued, needing to lift the weight of guilt that had been pressing him for weeks now, "we are killing old men and boys who are the life-blood of this land, the backbone of these people's farms, the livelihood of their flocks, and their fishing.  

"Because good men--honorable men--are dying under my command, in a war that isn't a legitimate war, for an Empire that ripped them from their homeland, and sees them as mere fodder to ensure the gluttony of the State. _Because--," he choked, his volley ending in an anguished defeat. "Because I send good men like Batrades to their deaths for following me unerringly.  _

"Because I hate myself for this," he managed to say before burying his face in his hands. "Hate myself for what I do when I am in the field, so that I think I am hardly a man anymore, but merely an instrument of death!"

At some point in that last proclamation, his words must have spurred her to motion, for she was suddenly at his feet, kneeling before him, grasping his hands in her own, his bowed head touching her uplifted face. 

"I weep," he murmured into her hair, the head-scarf having slid onto the floor, the spiraling tendrils soft against his lips, smelling of glacial winds and spruce covered mountain passes high above the earth. "I weep because, sometimes, I think what I feel for you is the one thing which reminds me I am still human, in spite of killing…in spite of everything."

Her hands were tangled in the coarse, oak-brown disorder of his hair, so at odds with the neat, short cropped beard outlining the curve of a strong cleft jaw, bold contours of a face her fingers stroked, easing, sharing his tortured sorrow. 

She tried to speak, once. Her words were jumbled, though, made unintelligible from the desperate, almost violent pressure with which he took her mouth in his, not sure if the salt he tasted was the evidence of his own tears smeared across her skin, or her own quiet response to his inner-turmoil.  

It was difficult, really, to do much else than kiss in that desperate way, for the moment.  He was still in his chair, his posture hunched over, reaching—thirsty man for precious water--to where she knelt, clutching at him, both lost in the timeless instant of touch. The taste of cider on his breath, the sandy feel of his facial hair across her neck when she reached up to kiss his brow, he paying creed to bite lightly at the sensitized skin along the exposed column of chin to throat. 

Their motions might have bordered on frenzied, and while desire awakened in natural order--breathing growing harsh, uneven, heart beats pounding out a time to the rhythm of the oldest dance in the world—the raw urgency fueling their physical contact abated, worked to calm the initial desperation. The moisture of her lips trailed along one of his earlobes, her nails dancing along the back of his neck, meeting with the cold, unyielding edge of his scale-plated cuirass.  

Nemhyn's breath in his ear, the muttered, "Oh by blood and Hades," was drowned in his absorption with trying to take her lips once more in his own. He gave up temporarily, losing himself in the texture of her hair instead, convinced the spirit of pine and fir must have lent themselves to the wild freshness, the essence of outdoors he kept inhaling deeply.  

Tangling fingers around unfettered curls, wishing to ease her head back, his lips seeking hers, his finger snagged on one of the pins failing to fully bind the mass of her hair. 

"Aih!" she expulsed with pain, half laughter and rising ardency, leaning back onto her heels carefully so he could free himself. "Are you trying to love me, or scalp me?"

His forehead resting against hers, his low chuckle reflected a somewhat lightened heart, eyes levelly focused on hers whilst concentrating on disentangling the enwrapped finger somewhere near the back of her head. "I'm sorry.  But…well, look at how you distract a man's attention," he accused with ribbing amusement.

"You don't seem to have required persuasion with a golden bough," she jibed back, her eyes flashing, holding their mirrored posture carefully, and he finally freed his finger without yanking any more strands from her head.

With the same hand he stroked along fine, even brows the color of a darkened auburn sunset, wondering if languid traces of their shared moment were as evident across his visage, noticing her bruised lips, the faint, red abrasions where his beard rubbed along neck or cheek.  

In the temporary silence, they said nothing, letting the distant sounds of music from across the fortress carry into the room, drowned, for beats at a time, by the lower moaning of the lonely winter's gusting drafts.  To feel her, to caress her like this, letting his hand slip along the sculpted curve of cheek, tracing her lips as she closed her eyes, soaking the sensation of his callused touch, was to feel life—to drink the spirit and strength of what a woman was.  

Catching his hand in hers, suddenly, wrapping her other palm atop it, she leveled a direct look at him—solemn and pensive.  "You kill and you have killed because it is necessary," she began softly, into the flickering of the candles sputtering, and the whisper of the winter wind outside. "Wars, whether they are legitimate or not, are always brutal and savage. But so are people. Yet, we—men and women—can be compassionate and gentle. The very same who make wars can create things of great beauty—in music, poetry, learning." 

"Healing," he interjected, his tone as quiet, intimate as hers.

The corner of her mouth quirked. "Yes, healing too," opening his hand to kiss the skin of his palm before curling her fingers back over it, placing it to her heart like the most prized gem in the world. 

Solemn, again, gravely, she continued, holding his eyes intently. "You kill when you have to; those men, today—whether they are old men and boys, or trained soldiers of the Picti—would have done the same.  They would not have spared your life had the scales been weighted otherwise. You lead men, and that is the nobility—the beauty of your nature.  Whether they are Roman, Sarmati, or Briton, they follow you because they love you."

A tinge of the previous bitterness came back into his voice, falling like a shadow over his sense. "And so they die for me."

"Perhaps," she said, still above a whisper, but firm. "But no gift ever came without a price."

"Why," he tried to get out, without choking upon the words. "Why did that price have to be Batrades?"

Which, of course, only brought her to lean forward on her knees once more, taking his face between her hands so he would notice her, and only her—understand what she imparted to the fullest extent possible.  

"He will live, Maximus." Always Maximus between them.

He had cautioned her about that once, not to use his old name—the dead name—so freely.  Her impertinent reply, said with scrupulous flippancy, regarded how it felt to identify a bull-mastiff as a bull itself, and vice versa.  _Lucius Castus might be your chosen name, but remember, I met you when you were still the hero of the Arena.  You really do have such little faith in my discretion…Maximus.  _

That had been in those days before the attempt on Arbeia.  Before the nickname of Artos—the Great Bear—seemed to exemplify the true spirit of his fortitude in battlecraft. And in leading men. 

Her spoken words jarred with the inner-meandering of his mind.  Doubtful, hoping—not daring to believe her just yet. "He—what?  Are you sure," came his hesitant query, a little giddy.  

He thought the world seemed a bit unsteady, or perhaps it was only the immense relief beginning to lighten the substantial winter gloom that had been darker than its usual wont. 

The effusive smile which broke across her features then--a lovely thing capturing the quality of sun's rays glancing off silver jewels, containing their own splendor, but brought to full refulgence with the light—bade him laugh outright.  A little wildly, a little hysterically, it was the way a farmer feels when rain begins to fall after a long, devastating drought, and only a season of starvation and death staring back from the long night.  

She joined him, her own delight—a ringing, joyous sound with the uninhibited resonance of a dancing brook or a tinkling stream of jewels--fed by the expression of his. 

 "Why didn't you say something before now?" he got out between the full, sonorous guffaws of his sudden gladness. 

He saw her blink, try to contain the brilliant, momentary mirth, assume an affront she failed miserably at, squealing in surprise and indignation when he hauled her up, bodily, onto his lap.  

"I tried," Nemhyn huffed pointedly, before relaxing into the warm strength of his embrace. "You looked so desolate when I arrived, and then you started with the—"stumbling in her words, coughing an embarrassed, "—_ahem," a flush coloring up her neck to the roots of her hair.  _

It was strange to see her blush like that, coyness as foreign to her nature as the happenstance of calm seas in winter.  For a woman whose directness could unsettle the most seasoned of warriors, the fact he could affect her brought a warmth to his soul, accompanied by an equally warm stirring to other parts of his body.  If she was aware of his physical response as yet, she chose to ignore it, balanced so she was leaning her head back against his shoulder, having changed the topic to one of much less personal intimacy.   

"He's very weak, still, is Batrades.  Fortunate for him he's a strong man and not an undernourished peasant-worker, though. He will be swinging a sword and riding at your right-hand again," the dryness in her tone underlying her opinion of what she viewed as men's strange exultation in displays of warfare.  "It may not be till well after mid-summer, but he is over the worst of his injury.  Fever already took its toll and failed; and if internal inflammation from a punctured bowel were to happen, it would have already. He's keeping down food, and--," pausing with another significant _ahem--, "doing other things that I'm sure he'd rather not have me relay to you.  But rest assured, it seems like…his system is in good, recovering order." _

"Your words fill me with gratitude," he murmured softly into her ear.  Which, in fact, they did—not to mention a sincere relief, but he was distracted by concentrating valiantly to prevent his hands from wondering where they rested innocently, lightly about her waist.  There was a pattern of amber beads his fingers traced, though, that meandered in a spiraling pattern, sown into her suede tunic, going up in a vertical weaving toward a seductive under-swelling—

"Stop!" she warned with laughing menace, sitting up straight, turning to break the proximity of their bodies, and—to his disgruntlement—frustrate his eluded fingers from the goal of their desired caress.  "It's apparent my words are filling you with something else as well," the brusque chiding punctuated by her raised brows, and a quick glance downward indicating she had been all too aware of certain bodily responses.

Her tone reminded him of a she-wolf snapping at a mate trying to impose himself on her before she was in her season.  

His tragic sigh would have done an actor proud, crossing his arms behind his head in aggravated arousal. "Gods woman, you're a torment! You withhold good tidings on a man who is like a brother to me, and you tease like an un-bred filly in springtime," he moaned.  

The glitter in her eyes held no pity, especially when she noticed his cheeky smirk.  She merely snorted an unlady-like _hrrumph, and rose from his lap with a wonderful, uncoiling litheness—indeed very much like the she-wolf he'd compared her to.  _

"But it's been almost—"

"Oh please!" she nearly hooted, a bubbling laughter cutting into his attempted gripe. "If that's the best you can think of in conjuring my sympathies, I have only to remind you of how _much longer it's been for most of your men."_

She did have a point.  It still didn't stifle a last endeavor, done more for effect than any other reason. "You know, the Sarmati say a woman is indeed very like a mare.  She may already be in her heat, but-

He wasn't ever sure how she managed to move so fluidly—one moment so utterly relaxed, making to exit the study, and the next a blur of motion. Not fast, just—flowing, so that she had him braced up against the back of his chair, her hands on his leather shoulder-bracings, her face mere inches from his, and her knee…wedged on the seat--mere inches from a rather more intimate area of his body. 

"—but it takes a stallion to let her know when she's ready.  Yes, I've heard that one quite often over the years," her eyes glittering, dangerous amusement, as her voice dropped to a hushed murmur, her mouth a bare finger's breadth from his. "You need a new line, Spaniard." 

His chuckle was warm, deep, a last refuge from not falling victim to the utter temptation of taking those lips in his one more time. "Why," he answered, "when the same phrase elicits the desired action."

Her frustration came out as a hissing exhalation, venting an, "Oh, you're completely incorrigible," throwing her hands up in the air when she realized he'd been playing on the short-fuse of her temper. 

Her outburst set him off once more, whooping in rumbling gales of laughter, winning him a glowering look that she couldn't hold, dissolving into the delightful fullness of her own exuberant mirth.  Hot and cold ran Nemhyn's mood, changing as frequently as the spring weather of Britannia, by turns, dizzying a man like a tempest at sea, or allowing him to glory in the sweetness of a golden sun spreading its golden rays across a honey-scented meadow of sweet-clover and heather in summer.  

Sunshine and summer fields were what Maximus was thinking of then, when the woman he rested his eyes upon, at that moment, maneuvered herself to plop into his lap, evoking a forceful "OOF," on his part.  He wrapped his arms around her before she made to break free from him again, and for a rare, precious moment, she simply rested against him, her arms around his neck, her breath warm against his skin while she wound her fingers into the hair curling down his nape.  

At the foot of the highland passes in the Alban north-country, the timeless winter wind swept through the fort, whispering of hidden mountain ways, deep isolated canyons, and glacial valleys, bound by rocky slopes, and crowned in a snowy royalty of frosty mist, crystalline encased branches of ice. The chill gusts of air wove between the shutter slats of the study's windows, rustling the parchment on the desk, playing a brief flirtation with the candle's flames upon the lamp-stand.

If one listened hard enough, the boisterous sounds of men shouting, clapping hands in time to a drumming rhythm could be heard as a distant undertone to the incessant moan of winter's lonely voice.

"I have to admit, as a chosen pastime, I think I prefer your soldiers' method of celebration—music, song, dance, a warm fire and endless vats of cider and ale," Nemhyn teased softly, raising her head to look up at him. 

He hadn't noticed, until now, observing this close and steady, how drawn were her cheeks, faint purplish shadows under her eyes marring the fine skin, dirt and bracken staining her clothing.  Regarding her, he frowned.  "How many days did you ride overland?"

"Three. Non-stop, nearly. Would you like to hear about some of the largest snowdrifts in bloody-Britannia; two of the widest rivers I ever held my breath over every time the horse crossed without the cracking of ice being heard; or the flurry that made me chose the wrong bend in a path leading me into a valley where a hamlet I remembered existing ended up not being there."

There was, as usual, a humorous irony in her voice, but it was tempered with a weariness he could fully sympathize with.  Along with a sudden realization.  "Did you ride all this way? Risking an overland journey in winter, just to tell me about Batrades' condition?"  He could feel the familiar furrow between his brows growing deeper by the moment, a warring of so many internal sentiments he couldn't focus on one specifically.

She only nodded, resting her head back upon his shoulder. Such a guileless motion, and so very Nemhyn—her non-verbal assertion of simple fact: _wouldn't anyone have done this? It was that aspect of her nature, breaking through at odd moments like this one now, which reawakened the tender novelty of what he felt for her. The depth of which he couldn't dwell on too long, for the vulnerability it exposed and the capacity for happiness he still couldn't quite accept. _

No gift ever came without a price.  

"Why didn't you wait until the roads were cleared, so the couriers could get through on the main highway?"

She skewed an eyebrow at him, wryly intoning, "You need to ask?  You know as well as I the roads north of the Hadrian divide haven't been maintained since Pius' time, to say nothing of what's beyond the Antonine--cart-tracks made over the summer.  If they're not washed away with the autumn rains, they get buried by the snow.  Besides, I know the countryside here better than most of the legionary messengers, and this—Batrades' imminent recovery—wasn't exactly considered first class correspondence that needed to be communicated straight-away."

He could feel himself protesting, shaking his head, "But you didn't have to risk—

She shifted to place a hand over his mouth, looking him direct in the eye, hazel flecked green and brown irises shadowed by the back-light of the lamp. "I know, but I did," she murmured gravely. "I know what Batrades is to you—what you are to him. I know what it has been like, here, over the winter—how you suffer through a campaign that has no meaningful end in site.  I did not think you needed to suffer further, believing Batrades to be dead, Maximus."

Words were stuck in a throat he couldn't quite get moist enough to speak.  For a moment, the wind was the only sound filling the empty silence when Nemhyn withdrew the gentle pressure of her hand on his mouth, tracing with a strong, slender finger, the outline of his beard, the sensitive skin of his lips.  "Gods, you're more precious than jewels, woman," he rasped shortly, held motionless by her touch.

She laughed, a throaty sound, wrapping her knuckles against his armored cuirass—hardened rawhide and scaled sheets of iron lending a cold ringing to the _shushing of the wind beyond the shutters._

"You know, without this horrid thing, it would be a whole lot easier to tempt me with your rather graceless endeavors at seduction."

Her grin was bewitching, her tone a parody of annoyance. It lightened the mood considerably. 

His responsive laughter was low and deep, leaning his head back to feel the full cleansing joy of it. A resounding sweetness nearly broke his heart when he felt her lean against him, fingers tangling in his hair once more, prolonging a kiss with such blazing ardency, they were both left breathless, shaking for countless beats of a pulse when they finally broke apart. 

Her face was nuzzled in his neck again. The effort to form words out of lips that were still numb with the feel of her tongue, the warmth of her breath, amazingly difficult. "I apologize for my lack of courtly etiquette," he managed softly into her ear.  He felt her shiver slightly, at the play of his words against her skin. "All I have are boring itineraries to relay, and memoranda to impart." He knew she would react like that, knew those places where he could blow softly, nibble lightly, tickle and caress, and she would melt against him, pliant and supple.  All the while, he needed to remember what he held was quicksilver in his arms; a woman who responded like the delicate buds of spring, unfurling beneath the gentle allure of vernal rains, and could as quickly command the rising passion of their coupling—dry brush and fire in high summer.

She shifted, with a regretful sigh, breaking their physical contact, moving to stand once more. "Leave it to you to remind one of duties unfulfilled," she admonished mildly, her hand cupping his cheek as she gazed down upon his seated form. 

"I wasn't reminding you of the things I still needed to do," he stated, irritated at himself, the unintended meaning of his words. "You don't need to leave…yet…I mean…," he trailed off, just short of awkward entreaty.  He had faced countless battles, skirmishes, led outright wars, planned campaigns, inspired men against seemingly impossible odds, taken down an Emperor—not to mention cheated death a time or two--and besides the obvious qualms any of those obstacles presented in the better course of nearly twenty years—he had somehow gained, along with a new name, a repute for stolid composure. In the name of the High Ones, what was it about speaking to Nemhyn that could dissolve, in bare moments, the connection between coherent speech and the expression of his soul—his heart.  

Sensing his sudden discomfiture, for an instant, she looked almost as uncomfortable as he felt, her hand drawing back from his cheek uncertainly, blinking, her eyes wavering from his, focusing with an inward-directed scowl at some randomly scattered military paraphernalia behind him.  

 Her pragmatic attitude could be her strength. In her line of work, she was used to the varied displays of emotion persons—patients--revealed when dealing with the latitude of illness and death. Admittedly, practicality was also her stumbling block when it came to personal complexity. She possessed an infinite capacity to dissect, like one of the occasional illicit cadavers she once told him about, her own emotions, and his, to the point where the classical philosophers of Greece would have been confounded or left weeping.

At a loss, he swallowed once into the peculiar tension of the silence—the incessant sound of the wind howling outside, spattering random flakes against the _principa's wooden shutters and stone walls.  It sounded like thousands of invisible fingers tapping their insistence to be allowed in on such a winter-blown night._

If her unease with intimate admissions of affection was disguised behind cerebral analysis, her grace had always been her own brand of humor.  With a wry half-grin, her head cocked to the side, one brow skewed in characteristic fashion, her glance at him was piercing—mischievous—lending the impression of a school girl half her age.

"Frankly, now is neither the time nor the place," she spearheaded into the silence. 

"I wasn't trying to force--," he began, as stilted as a teenage boy. Ridiculous given that he was hardly an adolescent, and he had loved other women—albeit few in number. 

"I know," she barreled on, stalwart as a determined plow-horse.  "And you never would. It comes down to four reasons, really.  One, I can only imagine how like Medusa's twin sister I must look at the moment. Even Diana, after the hunt, never entered an establishment of men without pulling a comb once through her hair. I haven't had a bath for three days going, and who would fathom the vermin that have taken up residence in the mop the Fates saw fit to curse me with.   

"Second, if I look like this after three days, gods only know, judging by _your appearance, how long it's been since you've had a bath. Snowstorms might suffice for soldiers, but unless I can smell more soap on your skin than horse, sweat, and battle's aftermath—snow flurries can't equal a hot soak in a tub…__dearest." Her smirk was mocking._

He couldn't keep himself from laughing into her diatribe as she continued, hearing her voice beginning to shake slightly, her motherly-scolding tone slipping only a fraction.  "Third, so long as you—and all of your vaunted warriors—insist on getting themselves injured, and bringing in equally wounded prisoners, I still have an infirmary to check on before I can even contemplate the bath house tonight."

"You don't have to go over there," he interjected. "At least not tonight.  I'm sure Publius has everything under control."

"Publius," she returned flatly, "is the one who asked me not two steps past the south-gate.  There's something about one of the Picti captives being of the Caledonii nobility.  I'm…curious," she added.

He dropped the banter for the moment, reluctant, but necessary. "The one that took a stab to the thigh in the ambush today?"

Nemhyn nodded absently. "Publius did mention something about a leg injury—saying it didn't sever the artery, but the skin and underlying muscle tissue looked like eviscerated pork-rind you would get from the butcher." The grim tension around her mouth reflected his sudden sobriety with the change in subject. "How did you know?" she asked offhandedly.

Maximus--Artos—his dead name, his new name, could have been no name at all for all he cared at the moment—shook his head once in rueful ponderence. "He refused to be carted on a makeshift gurney, so he walked—or rather staggered. His pride might have been commendable, but he would have done better to salvage his strength. The pain overcame him, he lost too much blood and he passed out, so he ended up getting hauled like a dead hind from a hunt anyway.  It's the kind of foolishness that comes with youth.  Experience usually teaches you to modify your delusions of heroism." 

"You would have done that.  In your youth, I mean," Nemhyn remarked, her eyes slanted in consideration at him. 

His reply was a significant glance, all of the truth of his entire life in that one look—suffering, grief, blessing, dauntless loyalty, friendship, honor, love—all lost.   And unexpectedly found. 

He saw the poise she drew from in order to hold that look, not flinch away from it. Notice too, she didn't pursue the subject, smiling with furious defiance, to ease them past his propensity for brooding somberness.

"Aren't you even slightly curious to hear the fourth reason about objecting to romantic pursuits in the officer's study," she hinted airily. "Well, besides the obvious fact of a desk for a bed and parchment as a poor substitute for linen sheets."

"Indulge me," he humored, nonchalant expectance scrawled all over his bearing, from the raised eyebrows, to his arms folded over the scale-metal pectoral of his cuirass.

Her smile was slow, as though relishing the flavor of a delicious sweet-wine. Slow and playing across the fullness of her lips, it was beguilingly enticing.

Still standing, Nemhyn bent forward to place a single index finger under his chin, allowing her to tip his head slightly, her eyes glittering with the embers of an arousal she could conceal like a Vestal if she wanted.  "Because you and I are going to need at least a few hours rest," her low voice causing the temperature—he imagined—to rise in their immediate proximity, "before we endeavor to pursue what you wanted…_to-night," drawing out the last word like a melodious endearment._

His mouth had gone dry, and he was clutching the arm rests of the chair so hard his fingers tingled—all to keep himself from clutching at her, and doing what men did with women who flirted and tempted in this way.  Leave it to the nine hells to care if they were in the commandant's study, unbathed and smelling of horse, sweat, and gods could guess what else. 

He knew she was well aware of the sudden pounding in his head, the hammering of his heart, and throbbing in others areas that was making him distinctly uncomfortable. "You don't," he exhaled roughly, "even want to guess at the images going through my mind right now, Nemhyn," keeping himself supremely still with an iron-will. 

She hadn't moved, but there was an intangible tautness in her posture, something smoldering in her gaze, her lids heavy, half closed, catching the intensity of his words, his eyes. Balanced on a brink, deciding who would capitulate first was always a battle of wills between them when both parties were so guarded about their intimacy—sharing body and mind—with someone so unexpectedly matched.  The affection was admitted, the tenderness unexpected, and the vulnerability it exposed took…getting used to.

But the tension in the room, between them—if it was lust or emotion--had become charged to such a point, a bow-string would have snapped from the pressure.  Impossibly, he felt perspiration break out over his forehead, in spite of the chilly room.

He was about to give in, the enrapturing spell she wove—part mocking play, part daring courtship—a clamor to his senses. All at once, the finger under his chin slid down his neck, toying with the stubble of his beard, traced up with coy whimsy to his earlobe.

His breath caught. Control was fleeing him, seeing a devilish glint in her eyes brightening as she bit her lower lip, then those same lips parting, and…

She tugged, deliberate and hard, on his ear, evoking a gasping, "AH!" out of him, pain an unexpected catalyst to what he'd been anticipating.  Useless to try and seize after her; she had taken advantage of the momentary distraction to flit out of his reach. 

Rubbing away the pain that temporarily singed his abused ear, he only just caught her words as she sauntered out of the room, her form disappearing into the darkness of the corridor beyond. "That's what I thought," she jeered back over her shoulder, her laughter bordering on cruel. "Save your imaginings for tonight!"

He grunted, the hollow feeling of un-satiated desire gnawing at the lower regions of his body. 

It still didn't stop the _thud of breathless expectation flushing through his veins, nor the bliss he only admitted to himself in his most reflective, honest moments.  Like this one—now.  _

His heart sang with the exhilaration of Batrades' life.  The gift that one more person who he had come to care for--when he had finally allowed himself, once more, to accept that greatest frailty and deepest dimension of human nature—would not lose their life on account of serving him. 

It had been Batrades, once, who had stipulated to him on men understanding women's nature's.  _Have you hunted wolves?  _

_Of course, often, the ex-gladiator had answered, fingering the yellowed canines about the leather thong on his neck. _

_Have you ever just watched them, sometimes, to get a sense of their behavior, the Sarmati prince's deep baritone rang through the cycling memory._

Maximus had shrugged, not considering the query worthy of a verbal response.

Huh, you Romans think a woman is like some pet dove or a scatter-brained rabbit. Something to be locked up and protected from the world, only allowed to come out on a short tether when she can be closely monitored.  You call this protection, then curse her for her feeble mind and her equally feeble heart and body. 

_Are your ways better, Maximus asked, doubtful, a challenge to Batrades' authority. Women were not a territory the Spaniard liked to tread, back then anyway. So few he'd ever known had been…feeble—in mind or in heart.  Just treacherous.  His hatred for Lucilla had vanished, dissipated long ago—difficult for him, but he had understood her reasons eventually. How could he justify hate when the bitter price she had paid was the same as his own had been.  The life of her son. _

Our ways are wolves' ways.  Not better, not worse, just more honest. A man is a deluded fool for thinking he can read the secrets to a woman's mind, but think how wolves are in their courting season. They play, they fight, they love—freely, frequently, without shame.  There is no question of dominance—the female is life.  What she finally offers is her gift, a privilege to the leader. Earned, not forced or stolen.  The wise wolf, like the wise man, learns not to question what has been bestowed his honor.  Think on it, Spaniard. 

He had, long and hard.  And for all his honor, his loyalty, the embattled years as a legate, and the embittered ones as a slave, through the death of his family, and the failed attempt to salvage a dying emperor's last wish, he had never expected to love again.  Not in that way.  Not so he could lose it again.  

It was only earlier that spring, nearly four years after the death of Marcus Aurelius, he had almost lost Nemhyn on the banks of River Douglas. The decisive victory, a triumph for salvaging Roman-Britannia, solidified his command of the Sarmati auxilia.  His hard lesson—the fact that whether you chose to accept your feeling for someone or not, their loss to the inevitable embrace of the afterlife could wound just as profoundly.  Indeed worse, for the missed opportunity of never having loved them at all.

It had taken nearly losing her for him to admit the coward he'd been, his struggle to deny what was between them. She never sought an apology for the pain he'd caused her, so many months ago.  He knew she never would—it was simply not in her nature.

The wind moaned, forlorn, whistling beneath the eves of the roof, and settling the wooden supports of the _principa's inner framework.  Maximus—Artos—shook his head, trying to empty his mind of the old tale of the wild hunt—spirits, battle-hags, heroes from lost ages and forgotten legend, riding on high, the phantasm-host, elements of winter's beckoning. He picked up the stylus to begin penning a first correspondence to Corstopitum, along the Wall of Hadrian, detailing the events of the day's failed ambush. _

His grandmother, the one from Hibernia, used to tell him stories like that—about the wild hunt. A sensible woman, with the heart of a lion and the temper of badger, straight till her dying day. She was given to fantastic tales she had brought with her from her homeland, seeking sanctuary with her own distant cousins of the Iberian tribes after the death of her lover-hero, as a young woman.  The stories had stayed with him through his childhood on to his adult life.  

Stylus scratching away at the parchment, he laughed to himself with vivid fondness, thinking if his grandmother watched him just then, what pointed comment she would have made about the angle his thoughts kept turning in regards to Nemhyn.  His…_love—the word still so new it caused a small jump in his stomach thinking of it--had infected him like the ambrosia of the high ones, the throbbing in his loins only just beginning to taper as he continued in the mundane task of official communicae.    _

In spite of such pleasant reveries, however, his thoughts kept turning back to a winter night's preoccupation with the reminiscence of his grandmother's narratives.  And, with his own penchant for morbid contemplation, thoughts of the dead. 

He had fashioned his own truck with those inhabiting the land of shades long since his exposure to Elysium.  Not Sight exactly, and not by his choice, it was an odd sense of knowing, seeing images where others didn't, of his dead wife and son, mangled, broken, flesh blackened and bleeding raw, shadowed corpses in shadowed corners, or hanging from branches and vaulted entrances of buildings. They would sway in the ghostly, otherworldly wind, and stare with cold-hearted, accusatory penetrance, in those moments where death stalked.  The pebbling of skin when glacial fingers passed, unseen but felt, in the heat of summer's day, or even in the chill midst of winter's twilight.  A cold that was colder than the bite of the frostiest highland gale. It was what had warned him, today, of the impending ambush, moments before it had occurred.

He replaced a candle that had finally burnt itself out on the three-tier lamp suspended from the bronze Eros. Underneath the ceaseless wind, he could still catch the distant draft of singing, men's voices from the officer's quarters, his quick, private smirk playing on his mouth when he thought of the hangovers tomorrow. Nemhyn would be more than busy dealing with the complaints of Hannibal's elephants galloping through pounding heads, and stomachs protesting the amount of alcohol imbibed by less than discriminate celebrants. 

_Gifts do not come without a price, Artos—leea-der of men, the voice rolled in with the moaning draft leaking past the shutters, ominous in its girlish, murmuring susurration, a giggle echoing along the stone-washed walls of the study._

He froze, looking up from the progress of his writing. Eyes darting with careful, cautious precision about the room's dusky corners, he glanced over a shelf filled with bare pieces of extra parchment, leftover banners from the last occupation of Pinnata Castra, a tarnished golden standard of an eagle next to the sterling-cast image of a dragon, teeth snarling in fiery vengeance. 

_She will make her own destiny, you can not prevent that, the deceptively playful giggle sounded again, at once behind him, and all around.   _

Other men, lesser men, would have panicked by now, reaching for a sword and stabbing at their own shadows.  Some had gone mad simply from hearing that voice even one time, impaling themselves on their own blades in their terror. 

Maximus—Artos—the Great Bear, simply set the stylus down upon the desk with deliberate calm, settling back in his chair to scrutinize the entire room with a wrathful glare.  "She's always done that," he bit out with tight vehemence.  

_YES! The murmur sounded with a sudden furious hiss, rattling like a serpent's tale with the rising gust straining the creaking shutters. __But will you continue to serve her, not simply as the defender, but as the king! _

"What," he mocked, then, laughing sharply, with razor-edge viciousness. "As the winter king?  To her…_Brigantia. She won't even acknowledge the title, and who am I to impose, crone!"_

_Not a crone Maximus, the voice suddenly dropping to a caricature of hurt-crooning, full of the dulcet cadence of Selene's voice, the way she once spoke to him in the quiet, hushed summers of Hispania's forever-gone nights.  It chilled him more than the sibilant tones from before.  _

He sat up straighter, but refused to give in to his instinctive alarm, the temperature in the room falling below that of the frigid air outside, the disembodied voice causing a wind to flow about the walls, tugging at the candle flames which had gone entirely translucent-blue to their wicks.

_And you, Maximus—now Artos—are the Winter King--the incantation of Selene's voice imparted, equally mocking, paralyzing for its emotionless, inhuman luster. _

_She will serve, you will all serve…eventually, her voice rang, dwindling, echoing about the stone walls of the study's gloom._

"Leave us alone, old woman. Haven't you meddled enough," he growled. 

The response, to his considerably growing dread, came, this time, in the avaricious timbre of masculine severity. _Woman, man—I am both and one. You would do better to hail me as All-father, who hung for nine nights before the well of knowledge, and leads the eternal host upon the winds of spilt blood and shattered lives.  Through pain is a child born, and only through suffering can one know the truth that life will reflect. You have served me well, Great Bear, even when you did not think to do so, but man's knowledge, his reasoning is incomplete without the intuition of woman—the instance of their wisdom. I seek a queen, a bringer of victory, in every age who will bind me to this land, the world of middle-earth. Whether she is in this life or in the next makes little difference for I am both the lord of the slain, and the bearer of souls across the Lethe._

Maximus' eyes stayed fastened on the candles, waiting for the moment when they would return to their natural orange-gold light rather than the eerie blue. They danced and wavered, casting no shadows at all, in a room drowned by more than mere night. "You have your Victorious One," he whispered furious, into the blackened oblivion that could swallow a soul. "I've seen her, riding a chariot, like she did when she tried to stave off the Roman invasion over a century ago.  Didn't her life suffice?"

Despite his stinging pretense, the stricken anatomy of his mind begged: _Please, not Nemhyn. He could never speak such weak words aloud, though, not even at the prompting of a god.  _

The bodiless voice wrapped around the dismal gloom imprisoning the study, mournful with infinite sadness and inevitable portent. _It is your choice to be the great oak, uprooted and shattered by the force of the river, or the driftwood, unresistant and cast along in the face of a changing time. Will you let yourself be shredded to pieces in the turbulence of the rapids, or will you chance the possibility, accepting the direction of the waters, and the hope of a peaceful shore?_

He almost crumbled, losing his nerve and his sanity on the cord of those last words. But he held firm to an innate, grounded stubborness—a remnant of the fatalistic stamina that had once sustained him through the wake of his family's death and the endless drudgery of the arena.

"I'll do what she asks of me, and will serve her with my life. Nothing more, nothing less, and certainly nothing at your whim…_old man," he enunciated with defiant explicitness, casting the words, with his glare, to the surrounding shadows._

The candles on the lamp tier blazed up, making the ex-gladiator--once a general, and a slave, an exile, and again a leader of men—think the statue of Eros had seen its last days as a solid semblance of molded bronze. Rather, the blue-light of the flames flared out with the rising spectral wind, the voice echoing in a whisper drowned by the temporal howl of winter's moaning. 

_That's all I have ever asked, Artos…Winter King, the words ending with a weak suspiration. _

The otherworldly wind sucked back to whatever ghastly place it originated, snuffing the candles out with a final incorporeal breath.  The disturbed papers on his desk whisked about like toy ships in the agitated waters of a child's tub, and only the surrounding, physical night leftover evidence of the disincarnate visitation.

Maximus sat as inert as a marble statue for countless exhalations, loud and gasping to his ears, breaking the silence immediately following the eerie encounter. 

In the darkness of a mortal night, he faltered to the entrance, unseeing, groping, bursting the heavy-paneled timber door open on rusting hinges that groaned in aged protest, swinging it so hard with desperate strength it banged loudly against the outer wall of the study.  

Leaning against the wall in the outer corridor, there was little protection afforded from winter's bite, the spray of the flurries that blasted him in the face when the fickle direction of the wind shifted down over the roof-top. He gloried in it, letting the frigid touch steady him back to material dimension, inhaling deeply of glacial air, and trying to convince himself he was shaking only because of the winter cold.  He'd left his long-cloak back in the study.  He wasn't going back in there tonight.  It had nothing to do with fear; he let spirits walk where they would when he recognized them.  They were usually harmless things, wandering mindless, lost in a world of mortal time and place. 

Where immortals tread, he couldn't contend.  What man could.  On the morrow, he would come back here, as though nothing had ever happened, complete the tasks he ought to have tonight. But for now he was finished.  He was tired, fatigued, and he couldn't think straight.   

_I'd have done better to get drunk with the rest of the men, he thought in sour amusement, beginning to make his way back toward the __praetorium, and consequently, his sleeping quarters. _

Thoughts of Nemhyn brought some soothing warmth to cold, numb limbs, and an equally dread cold heart, but the disquiet conveyed in the words of that immaterial voice echoed through his soul. 

I seek a queen…whether she is in this life or the next…no gift comes without a price… 

Batrades' life had been spared…this time.  He too, had escaped death more than he wanted to think.  And Nemhyn, the exquisite blessing he had only recently come to accept, had eluded her own eternal journey to the darkness more than once.  Most people did, it was the providence of being human, and how your lot fell with the Fates.  

Just barely struggling out of his armor, discarding his sword belt with a loud clunk to the tesselated floor, he found some thoughtful servant had left a steaming basin of water over a brazier, a bar of soap on the side.  He utilized both to good measure, his breath curdling vapor in the air, toweling off before diving under down-quilt, ample furs of sheep-hide and wolf, and rough linen sheets, rubbing against his bare skin.  

He shivered until his body heat warmed the bedding, wondering when Nemhyn would come in, his sleep-heavy mind pondering how many blessings a man could earn when he'd lost everything once, already. What he'd had in that other life, as Maximus Decimus Meridius had been better, in some respects, some aspects irreplaceable, like his wife and son.  But he'd been more naïve, then, certainly as far as his duty to Rome.  He'd fought his whole life, defending her borders, places where Roma Mater held a novelty, had the potential for the civilizing awareness Marcus Aurelius had once hoped for.  He, Maximus—Artos now-- hadn't realized the city She had stemmed from was already showing signs of her own internal corruption. 

It was a natural progression for an old tree to drop new seeds in fresh soil, anticipating the day when death would come, as it did to all living things.  The Empire's hope now lay in her provinces, away from Italia and the infernal stench of her political wars.  And her civil wars—even Albinus couldn't ignore Severus' claim to the throne without staking the assertion of his own legitimacy.  

The thoughts streaming through his mind, as weary as he was, were not comforting, and left him seeing the images of old men and boys all over again—Picti faces, not warriors, but commoners, or stripling youths too young to have been allowed into active battle. Slaughtered in the name of defying the Eagle, and punished under the justice of that same symbol.  That was what Rome meant to Alba.  

It wasn't too late to change that, make something productive of this wasted winter campaign, but how…

He never knew when he dropped off to a welcome oblivion, nor when Nemhyn had at last returned.  He was so deeply beyond coherency she had carefully slipped between the covers after returning from the bath-house, never hearing her surprised gasp when she snuggled next to him, finding him as unclothed as she usually preferred to sleep.  Nor had he been aware of how she kissed the old scar on his shoulder, burying her face in the crook of his shoulder, the strong, corded muscle of his neck, holding him tightly until he stopped muttering about blood, dead boys, and vengeful gods.

He was only aware, hours into the hushed stillness after midnight, when she rose, exiting to relieve herself, and hadn't come back straight-away. He'd gone to seek her out, reasoning she was most likely fine, but his concern since that otherworldly encounter in the study driven by a new source. He couldn't quite admit, in the depths of the night, when men can hear their thoughts more clearly than at any other time, her presence was light upon the shadow in his being; her absence, an invitation to the despondency of his mind.  

That was when…

Later in the out-tide of night… 

…he'd been watching her for sometime, standing there in the moonlight reflected off the snow blanketing the _praetorium's inner yard.  Watching the emotions play across a face whose austere beauty--pale and incisive with a slight crescent arch of a nose, prominent plains of her cheeks--seemed heightened in the stark setting of white-cold, frozen star-shine, and black ice glazing the trunks of the barren trees.  _

It was a strange thing, a rare opportunity to watch her so unguarded, seeing the evidence of the pensive, sensitive spirit belying her outward show of practical irony.  A physician's attitude was the face she presented to the public world, frequently, even to him.  It was a defense, Maximus knew, cultivated from long years practicing in a profession dominated by men, tutored only by her mother, and encouraged by a father whose own love for a British woman many years before, laid the basis for the immense devotion Antius Crescens asked of the men under his command. 

He was hidden in the shadows, around an adjoining, pillared hall that brooked the courtyard, not wanting to intrude, and not wanting to leave…just yet.  Something in the way she leaned against the pillar held him. The blanket drawn tight about her form obscured rich contours of a body he could have traced as a blind man--probing, exploring--with fingers, lips, and tongue. A very happy blind man. She would follow, occasionally, with that same pensive stare, the fitful bursts of wind loosening piled flakes from their place on the twisting tree limbs, or banked on the ground, scattering free across the snowy courtyard.  An insular land of fey opalescence, a diamond clear sky had cleared earlier in the night, strewn with thousands of crystalline stars, ice coating the branches and trunks with a black gloss, bejeweling the hibernating royalty of this inner-realm.  

These were her accomplices, the elements of an invernal soltice—night, peace, and a pristine chill that could make a breath hang in the air before floating away, upon the light cast by a lucent, iridescent sliver of moon.  They beckoned him, enraptured him so that he stepped from out of the shadow, treading upon the flagstones of the passage, through alternating patterns of moonlight, darkness, and snowdrift, until he arrived just on the other side of the pillar supporting her. 

The scuff of his shoe, upon the concrete flooring, must have startled her the instant before he paused opposite her chosen colonnade.  Her relaxed posture, propped against the column, broke like a spring, a frightened doe ready to flee. _No, he quickly amended, stopped short and caught utterly breathless, for a moment, by the look she cast in the direction she'd heard his step, __more like the she wolf again.  Not panicked--cautious and testing, finding sanctuary, fading into shadow while she decides if the intruder is a threat.  _

Gods, in that instant, before she had stepped behind the pillar, seeking refuge from moonlight refracting off lambent snow, the awareness of her beauty—a thing so ephemeral one could easily miss it in the plain light of day—cut him to the very core of his soul.  That beauty, as with everything else about this winter night, appeared touched by the solstice—this strange ambiance of un-reality and vivid dream.  She seemed…transformed somehow in that moment. Not the human woman he knew, but a creature of the mist-hidden realms of the old ones.  Something far more ancient—and so ageless—arcane wisdom lending its own immortality to the cryptic depths of her eyes, a knowledge of wild places and wild creatures existing before the mundanity of men had dulled the unsullied brilliance of new creation from the middle-lands. 

An irrational fear filled him, fostered by the strange mysticism of the night.  If a man could vow his vengeance in this life or the next, bridging worlds between the afterlife and the living, surely there was no reason why the lord of the slain couldn't beckon his mortal-queen—immortal consort—with the frost-shrouded enchantment of an invernal moon.  

She hadn't stepped from out behind the refuge of her pillar yet. And he needed to say her name, hear the reassurance of her blessedly mortal voice, to know she was the flesh-and-blood woman he'd held in his arms earlier that evening.  The one who blushed, and laughed, mocked and teased, could make a snide comment and banter with him to his heart's dear content.  That she hadn't become changed, immutable, to a creature of ancient lore, a thing of polar moonbeam and silvered intangiblilty. 

"Nemhyn," he entreated searchingly, softly into the silence of the winter night.


	2. The Veiled One of Winter

The Mark of the Winter King: Part 3 

**Winter Solstice-183 CE**

**Fort of Pinnata Castra, Alba (Scotland-Inchtuthill, Tayside)**

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Some notes as usual—first off, this part is DEFINITELY FOR THE MATURE AUDIENCES AMONG YOU!!!  AS IN…or you get "swiggy-uncomfortable" with sex scenes, then you should turn back now.  There's nothing excessively grotesque in the descriptors, but yeah—the protagonists in this scene are not just holding hands…let's put it that way.

The verses toward the end of this piece came from Susan Cooper's, The Dark is Rising (my indulgence, and tribute, to a beloved childhood series—this particular book, having been set, appropriately, during the twelve days of Christmas).  It just sort of tied in with the whole moon-wintry-snow-lonely highland-lovey-theme.

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Somehow his voice, deep-tones resonant with a robust masculinity, still caused an unanticipated thrill to shiver through her nerves. Her pulse simply started hammering with one word, forcing her to draw short on breath, a wave of pleasurable warmth—tangible—passing through her veins, leaving her feeling flushed, a bit slack-legged.   When he said her name like that—especially when he said her name like that--"Nem-yn"—she was completely defenseless.  His accent clipped the syllables, silencing the emphasis leading into the -_hyn, rumbling with an edge of military gruffness, refined by a shift in tenor conveying a piercing vulnerability and a stirring tenderness.  Her name, the way he had spoken it just then, dreamlike and full of…something—concern, longing—made the utterance seem buoyed in the soft glow of moonlight, encapsulated by this midnight kingdom, an opalescent radiance of snow, icy-shimmering blackness on bare tree-branches, and millions of diamond-specked stars overhead. _

She hadn't stepped out from the other side of the granite pillar, thinking how silly it was to be so entranced by one word, the way he had spoken it.  She needed to lean for a moment more, let the icy, gritty feel of the stone beneath her cheek lend her some of its stony impartiality, cool the warmth tingling along her limbs in spite of the frosty chill of winter wind gusting through the courtyard.  She wore only a single, scratchy woolen blanket as a mantle—she ought to have been freezing out of her skin by now.  

She felt, rather, like she'd been working face-in and stooped over the bread ovens all day.

Ridiculous the man should be able to do this to her.  If he ever knew how much she…well, he must have known—it was why, over the year and a half of their contact, they had either been at each other's throats, or standing strong, by each other's sides, throughout Britannia's perilous hours.  

She heard the scuff of his step from the other side of the granite column, coming round about the shadowed interior of the night-bathed corridor, rather than the opposite side, hedging the snowy ground of the unsheltered courtyard.  Her breath left a vaporous wisp in the air, trying to stifle a sudden, whimsical giggle. She ducked, circling further back, retreating from his cautious approach for a moment more.  

The action really was not worthy the dignity of someone—a grown woman—her age, but she indulged it anyway, clutching the blanket about herself tightly to stoop, cupping her hand into an errant snowdrift piled along the pillar's base.  He paused, not quite coming into her full perspective, the outline of his silhouette just illumined by the pellucid glow of moonlight on snowy earth.  There was a watchfulness, a caution about his posture that made her think, unwarranted, of a wild animal testing the air for danger—not exactly a lover searching out his wayward partner on a winter's night.  More like a lover wanting to protect his wayward partner from…what?  Other men?

She let him stand there, alert to something she wasn't aware of out in the courtyard, stepping carefully the rest of the way in back of the pillar, shadow completely absorbed her form, moonbeam and the icy dazzle of the garden blocked from her view temporarily.  Snowball in hand, it chilled her palms and fingers, focusing on the broad shouldered outline of his body, struck anew by the raw power of the man--the wary grace he managed to exude, even when not in full, embattled action. His back and arms were muscled enough, even without armor, to block the convoluted shapes of twisting, snow-cloaked tree limbs, and thickened, blackened trunks, from across the garden's scintillating perimeter.  

The edges of her blanket swished, flapped in the soft, glacial breeze sweeping from the roof-top, whistling down the pillared corridor, disturbing the night's silence with a snapping of cloth.  It was enough to alert him to her approach from in back of the granite column.  

When he turned, she couldn't make out his expression in the darkness, the moon's backlight obscuring any details of his visage.  His tone said enough.

"Nemhyn?  Are you--

SPLAT!  His words promptly cut off by the wet, slushy sound of a snowy-projectile hitting him square in the face and mouth.

Springing back around the colonnade, he sputtered, "What in the name of Jupiter's balls, woman!"

The giggle erupted from her throat, pursuing him closely, emerging full into the moonlight. Tugging the blanket about her, she simply kept on laughing, her gaiety light, welling-up into the night's chilly silence, watching him continue to spit bits of melted snow out of his mouth, and wipe with the sleeve of his tunic over his beard, drying his forehead and cheeks.  His scowl, rather than making him forbidding, took the lines responsibility and grimness had etched about his eyes, and lent him the appearance of a boy who had just been flattened by a blow in his first bout of sword training.  Some shock, not a little irritation, and a smirk he was trying valiantly to suppress, attempting to hold to the dark frown painted across the bold definition of his brow and cheeks.

She tried to have sympathy for his dignity. A little, anyway, by keeping her voice from shaking with repressed mirth.  "You know, it's not Jupiter's balls you should be worried about.  The gods can look after themselves, usually--especially, I would figure, certain prized areas of their bodies.  You, however," she admonished with a glance up and down, frowning at his clothing choice, "might give a little more thought as to what you decide to wear when you wander around deserted hallways of your _praetorium on a winter's night."_

Gods preserve the man, didn't he feel the least bite of cold in the middle of winter.  An unbleached, untucked linen tunic, loose at the neck, and felt trousers, the sort men wore--from off-duty soldiers to common farm folk--shielded his legs from the full sharpness of the glacial air. And that was all.

The articles of his clothes, like the edges of her blanket, were tugged in the moaning draft breezing across the courtyard and over tree-limbs, whining through the hall, molding his garments to a burly physique, corded muscle formed from long years of wielding sword and shield.  He glanced down at himself with a belittling grunt, as though the cold was hardly worthy of acknowledgment--not existing if he chose not to recognize it.  

Suddenly, looking up, he caught her eyes, fixing her with a simmering, penetrating focus. "If we're comparing propriety, Nemhyn," his gaze scorching over her blanket-obscured body, "your attempt at modesty leaves a lot to be desired."

She knew he saw her hug the folds of the old woolen mantle tighter about herself.  An instinctive motion, like the way she drew herself straighter, looking him levelly in the eye. Archly, she replied, "You just wish you had access to what was underneath."  

He didn't even raise an eyebrow at her tone, merely sniffed into the silence of the winter chill, expelling a curdling vapor of breath, a corner of his mouth twisting up, wry appreciation of her words.  

It was troubling, the oblique hunger in his eyes, the elusive magnetism her body could respond to even if she tried to ignore, for moments longer, the increasingly loud pounding of her heart, blood flushing her cheeks.  The pulling, drawing sensations melting from somewhere deep inside of her lower belly, rolling down her legs and up, through her arms, down to her finger tips--a warm, delicious wave of desire.  

She hadn't realized how ragged her breathing sounded until she saw his nostrils flare, the sound of a long, in-drawn breath, his own attempt at establishing control over insistent, physical sensations.  Even in the icy setting of a winter's courtyard, enshrouded in the blackened shadows of night, moonlight--dazzling over snow, luminescent and bright--could still capture a woman or man, together, in a timeless moment of alluring enthrallment.  

She sought refuge in voice, resistant till the last, against what her body was yearning toward, and her mind wasn't quite ready to give-over just yet.  "I, at least, had the reason of needing to relieve myself in order to explain my…poor choice of winter-wear," the manner of her words huskier than usual.  She cleared her throat, breathing deeply of the chill wind rising in a sudden gust, disturbing ice-coated trees that creaked, weaker limbs, somewhere out in the snow-blanketed garden, snapping with a shattering, frigid sound of glass on rock.  "What was your excuse," meeting him eye-to-eye, unblinking.

The banked intensity of his expression flared, momentary, the gray orbs of his eyes, in the moonlit world they inhabited, darkened to shaded coal-jet, piercing her through with an unseen fire.  A mood, tension, rising as her breath caught, all once broken by his sudden, warm chuckle.  "My personal bed-hearth left, and it started getting cold.  The tunic and breeches were the easiest things to feel out in the dark when I went to go seek her out."

"So you came out here?" she asked, punctuating her words with a sniff. "Where it's even colder?" Derision, culminating, promptly, into a wellspring of her own laughter. 

Nemhyn quieted, seeing the grin that lightened his normally serious countenance fade, replaced by an inscrutable, troubled expression, as he glanced away from her, then back over her blanket-clad form.  

The deep timbre of his voice rumbled into the winter's silence.  "_Cailleach Beare," his clipped articulation roughening the softened gutturals of native British speech. _

The words, along with the melancholy look he threw her, sent an involuntary shiver--this time not of mounting ardor--down her spine, raising the hairs on her forearms. 

"What," she whispered, dread, doubt and cold running deeper through her heart than the already considerable frostiness of the winter night.  The blanket, as old as it might have been, was thick, a tight weave of wool--seemed sufficient until this sudden, inner chill, worked its way up her spine.

Despite the raw, muscled power of his physique, he leaned back against the stone-pillar, exuding the restrained poise of a wild predator, clasping his hands behind himself, propping one heel against the rectangular, concrete foundation of the colonnade.  _A wild predator, she thought unbidden, __or a man who has spent a lifetime training with sword, lance, shield and horse.    _

His gaze, searching and steady as it could sometimes be, held a sudden, sweet tenderness--a vivid expressiveness she often found difficult to hold for the bare vulnerability of his soul it communicated.  "_Cailleach Beare," he repeated softly, a whisper of the silent resonance in solstice peace.  _

She said nothing as a faint smile, one of memory that didn't touch his eyes this time, played across the bearded lines of a strong jaw.  "The Veiled One of Winter," he explained with that same soft gentility, remembrance lending a low quality to his utterance.  

She knew very well what the phrase meant.  That was why it had caught her so off-guard, a disquieting unease freezing at her inner-sense.  

"I think most northern people's have a similar tale they all relate," he went on, his eyes traveling over her face and form, a probing, impenetrable affection.  "The Germani simply called her the Hyrrokkin's Wicca--the witch--

"--of the Winter Realms," she chimed in, muted and low.  "Yes, I know."

His throat worked, a furrow deepening across his forehead as he combed a hand through mussed, wiry waves that simply refused to lay tame over his ears and neck.  There was a reason why he'd kept it shorn in the years he'd been a legionnaire and a gladiator: it was a very Roman thing to do. Since she and her mother had stolen him out of Rome over a year and half ago, at the summons of Marcus Aurelius' daughter, he hadn't seen fit to sheer the springing, dark-brown locks so short. That orderly trimming of hair, so wonderfully thick--many a woman's envy--hadn't seemed appropriate anymore while assimilating to the quasi, multi-roled position of commander to the entire Sarmatian cavalry--a liaison between Britannia's native chieftains and her legionary garrisons. He staunchly refused to let it get longer than his shoulders, the shorter lairs blending over his temples into the longer tresses at his nape.  The length, as it was, seemed an unspoken pronouncement of his Roman heritage compromising with the authority he held amongst a barbarian peoples from the eastern steppes.  Peoples who judged a man's virility, his strength, upon the length of hair, as they estimated a woman's status in the tribes: long hair meant freeborn, shorn locks meant slave.  

Another draft of wind moaned with mournful longing, whistling through the treetops of the garden's arboreal, ice-leaden kingdom, sprinkling light, loose flakes across the snow-ensconced domain.  Nemhyn turned her face into the brunt of the glacial breeze, feather droplets of winter-lace, cool and tingling across her cheeks, catching in the wind-toyed strands of her hair. 

She wondered what he saw just then, for the adoring marvel in his eyes was almost too much to bear, making her want to duck her head, avoid the voiceless yearning she beheld.  

His words cut into her thoughts, just as she was pondering, trivially, how unflattering wind was to hair like hers--snarling it and making it a frazzled nightmare a gorgon wouldn't have wanted.  

"They--the Germani--say she comes down from her mountain stronghold once in a great while. A cruel land of pristine ice, diamond-frozen lakes, frostbitten fir and pine, where spring's thaw never touches her winter-locked heights and towering peaks.  Even her lofty valleys, where flowers might blossom under the nurturance of a warming sun in lower altitudes, remain encased in snow and a frozen drapery of silent mist, sun and moon shining with equal strength throughout the whole of the year."

His steady gaze held her enraptured, hypnotized by the spell of his voice, the near-rhythmic chant of his words. "Upon her fancy, she takes up with a human man for a time--keeping his house, lying with him as his wife, and even bearing his children.  And they are content…sometimes mere months; sometimes years."

His voice dropped to a solemn cadence, a sadness that colored his visage. "There is always an ending though, for she grows bored, begins to dream, first, of her white, snow-kissed dominion where she is queen of the winter wind, and her wolves and ravens, the only creatures daring her ice-bound slopes.  Her ache in the place where a heart would be, if she were a human woman, warmed by flesh and blood, begins to grow until she can no longer ignore the howling of the wolves on a frost-driven winter's night, nor the blizzards that blow, furious and unforgiving, across the barren fields of men's farmlands, untamed forests, stealing the lives of young and old, human and animal, all helpless before the merciless strength of winter storms."

She wanted to speak, to break the thrall of the deep, sonorous richness in his voice.  His eyes held her prisoner though, motionless, as frozen as the leafless, icicle-adorned branches scattered throughout the courtyard.  Clutching her makeshift mantle, she remained spellbound before him, an arms-length away from where he leaned, the granite pillar, a single colonnade in a series of identical columns lining the corridor.  Letting the black and white world of cold moonbeam illuminate the snow-blanketed garden, a star-strewn sky glint against a sable domain with the same pristine, cutting beauty--distant, untouchable beauty--that seemed to embody the winter enchantress he depicted.

That same moonlight capturing, bathing them in a pellucid, hyperborean shadow amongst snowdrift, hoary granite pillars, cold flagstone, and obscuring darkness.

"On a winter-solstice eve," he intoned, something in the odd, desolate pitch of his voice telling her he was drawing his tale to a close. "She will flee to one of the sacred groves of oak, ash and beech trees crowning lowland hillocks of the Continent.  Awaiting the full moon, the right congruence of a winter's wind, she listens for the sudden baying of wolves as they trek across the flat plains skirting the rise of her sanctified copse.  When the wolves of winter hunt, wise men lock their shutters and hide beneath their blankets, sure to keep the fire of their hearths blazing high.  Thus, the state of her mortal husband, until the morning, when, in the watery dawn of a gray-light, he sees his wife's footprints tracking in the snow, disappearing into the hills and trees above their farm.  He goes to look for her, thinking to find her frozen corpse fallen along the track, only to wander up toward the grove of trees on a wind-blustered plateau.  And discovers her foot-prints suddenly end, just disappear before untrammeled snow in the middle of the grove, except where a series of wolf prints can be distinguished, and her shawl--untouched by blood or torn flesh--the only element left of her existence.  

"A garment as pure white as her skin was said to be, like new milk, and made of a material lighter than silk and softer than swan-down--a remnant of the moonshine she fled upon, a wisp of spun snowflakes, the icy water that flows in her veins, and blanches her skin."

She seemed to have lost the capacity for speech, as entranced as he seemed to be, studying her figure--what he could make out of it, covered by the shapeless blanket--his gaze playing over the features of her face.  

For the first time, a hinted embarrassment appeared in his attitude, his eyes skirting from her own, a self-conscious drop of his chin, and a sheepishly boyish grin that made him seen more like a youth of thirteen than a man of three and thirty. "_Cailleach Beare," he said, a pondering shake of his head and a small chuckle.  "I thought you might have fled upon the moonshine, seduced by an invernal solstice night to leave behind the world of men. No more than a memory, a rumor of snowdrifts and a tendril of mist and stardust."_

She wanted to cross the distance to him; wanted him to take her in his arms and melt the chill of trepidation keeping her, uncharacteristically, from sharing in his easing humor.  

Instead, Nemhyn rested a glance upon him, steady and cool, like the incessant nature of the eternal highland winds shifting gentle through the icy palace of the night-bound courtyard.  "How disappointing it must be, then, for one to discover merely a human woman where one fancied immortal glamour."

"No…no disappointment," the worry in his pitch, his alacrity of response, doing nothing to comfort her disquiet.  His hand reached out as he made to lean forward, seeking to touch her, then paused, inexplicably, retreating back like a spooked bird, to be concealed behind him once more.  "And not merely a human woman, but a gods' be thanked, blessedly mortal woman," an emotion coming through, rasping in his voice, as inexplicable as his reluctant gesture had been. 

Shaking his head, scowling, he burst into a rapid tirade,  "I think sometimes, I must be going mad, hearing the voices of gods and shades upon the wind. Then, Cyanus tells me he hears them too, and either we're both deceiving ourselves, or--," he broke off, concealing a shudder from over his deceptively relaxed posture. 

"Or they are trying to elucidate a truth to you," she queried into an unexpected silence, the whispering wind dying away momentarily.  The words, even as she uttered them, struck her with an apprehensive sense of falsity, setting her further on edge, wondering if those same gods he referred to were listening upon this private exchange.  

In the moonlight, the struggle he fought, internalizing her words, was apparent across his visage.  It was the same as her conundrum. 

Neither of them--Nemhyn nor Maximus--were out-rightly impious.  Each was given, however, to the more empirical aspects of sense and intellectual interpretation--what sight, hearing, taste and touch could detect--they consequently construed a belief about the world, how it operated, without jumping to immediate superstition or superfluous explanation.  Usually.

To not believe in gods was profanity, blasphemy almost, but she had doubted every once in a while.  Presuming they played such a direct influence, not only in one's life, but upon one's actions, was like admitting every time one walked out from a sheltered building, one risked hail pummeling your head, even on a cloudless, summer day.  They may not always make their presence known, but They might always be there--at any moment, on a whim, deciding to make life invariably inconvenient.  The stories, the myths, portrayed Immortals as being vain, pompous, inconsistent in whom they blessed, and their reasons for cursing, often brought about because of human arrogance.  

Most of the stories had also been formulated by humans; the rituals they reflected, demanded by priestly-classes, meant to atone or appease the gods, kept the devout in a grip of superstitious fear.   It was the same whether one followed the Roman pantheon, the mystery cults of the East, or the native British deities. When activities of scholarly pursuit, explorations of logic in philosophy and the natural sciences, were prevented based upon humanity's collective appeal to age-old folk beliefs and superstitious fallacies, Nemhyn--following in the path of her mother and father--spoke bitterly, if privately, against the prolific tendency of an uneducated peasant class to be ruled by false notions of magic, and self-limiting sacraments. Her mother had been the first one to teach her that notion.  Her mother, Maeve, who had long walked in the shadow of true Immortal presence, and knew Them to be infinitely nameless, capricious beyond human comprehension, elemental in Their paradigm of the universe, and as subject to the changing tides of fate and chance as any mortal.  Not anything related to what the vast majority of priests, druids, and most other religious affiliates desired their flock of ignorant, blindly following worshippers to believe. 

Maximus, for all of his difficulties with her mother, had agreed wholeheartedly.  Nemhyn thought, just perhaps, he was thinking the same thing once more, observing the series of emotions animate his amazingly expressive façade. 

The mellowed winter breeze picked up, loosening flakes to scamper across the white-covered courtyard, chasing about the stone-colonnaded hall like the countless pattering of mice-feet. 

And she spoke.  

"I heard it earlier this evening, too.  When I was walking through the wind-storm that blew up, trying to get from the infirmary to the baths, I heard Their voices."  He blinked in reaction to her words, glancing up at her, trying to dampen the unaccountable alarm flashing in his eyes.  Alarm and…something else.  "I thought I was simply hearing things, too. I couldn't understand most of what They were saying, but I could make out one phrase quite clearly," she whispered, hesitant, fearful, her lips not wanting to shape the next syllables emerging from her mouth.  "_Cailleach Beare."_

Something hard and scornful darkened his gaze.  Not directed at her, she didn't think.  "We're being played like pawns in a game of hunt and chase," he bit out, low and resentful.  Dangerous. "If we refuse to bend to Their will, they will somehow force us to carry out Their bidding in the end…usually not until one is looking from across the other side of the Styx."

_Not exactly the most pleasant of thoughts to harbor on a winter's solstice reflection, she mused ruefully._

The sentiment was echoed in her remark.  "You would think They would find something better to amuse themselves with than consistently pervading the world of humanity and all of its trials, tribulations, and inconveniences." 

She could see his sardonic reception, pondering her reply, the way his mouth turned up at one corner, and a less embittered light in his eyes. It was heartening, noting his façade, his posture, easing somewhat, but in the interim of their exchange, she was beginning to form a picture--a dawning insight--into what all of this might, possibly, be pointing toward.  

It was not a comforting awareness in the least.

Her fingers felt rigid, grasping the blanket's edges about her with submerged apprehension.  "Maximus, you must listen to what I have to say very carefully," her voice sounding reedy, so tightly was she trying to keep it from shaking.  

Even in the dimness of the moonlight's refraction off the snowy world of night, she could see the depth of his worry crease his brow, his eyes calm, though the rising wariness of his stance, leaning against the pillar, was a near palpable thing.  Like the vapor of breath from his quiet respiration.

He still managed an impulsive, facetious grin.  Momentary, but definitely making a heavy mood all the lighter in that one instant.  "If I might suggest something?" She cocked a skeptical eyebrow his direction. "I can assure you, upon my honor, I'll listen even more attentively if you share some of that blanket with me while you divulge your profound insight."

Disbelieving, she hooted like an incensed barn owl. "Incorrigible!" leaving a large cloud of mist hanging between them in the frost-gripped, winter ambiance of the night, "is that what I said before?" In her reactive frustration she almost threw up her hands, characteristic of her irritation.  

Impossible, given she wore close to nothing…in truth, nothing at all, beneath her makeshift mantle.  She settled for hugging the ragged edges of the old woolen cover about herself even closer.  "Reprehensible," she rebuked, a distinctly northern burr on the word, "would have been closer to the truth!" Trying to put vehement sincerity into the slur.    

The way he bent his head back, letting out the full, liberated, rolling delight of his laughter was more than enough evidence he didn't buy her semblance of piqued ire.   

She sniffed loudly, considering, for a moment, bristling further, than abandoned the idea.  He was already too overtly confident when it came to getting under her skin.  

His deep tide of laughter had quieted to a successive chortling, examining her blanket-clad form with an expectant interest. "Well?" Raised brows and a self-satisfied smirk quirking his lips.

A battle of wills, always between them.  He prided himself on knowing just what to say or do when he wanted to catch her off-guard, make her flare into a temper, only realizing, belatedly, she had risen, once again, to a bait he threaded along with teasing, tongue-in-cheek comments.

He had called her intemperate, once--not with any real feeling other than reluctant, amused affection.  

_Intemperate and unpredictable, had been his exact words.  She had bridled, of course, some sharp comment or another about to come out of her mouth.  Then, thinking--as she was in this very moment--keenly holding his gaze, shivering in her woolen mantle, amidst a wintry kingdom of snow-glistening trees, ice-glazed branches, and diamond-studded night, one could never be blamed for acting in accordance to their nature.  _

She moistened her lips, pressing them together, then, smiling languid and slow as she tilted her head, consideringly, to the side, letting the wind gather and lift the strands of her unbound hair. She saw his eyes follow the straying tresses, like tracking a flock of birds taken to flight.

It was ludicrous, really, attempting an imitation of a seductress, the risibility of her portrayal exemplified by lowering her lashes flirtatiously, coquettish and mischievous. Drifting over with a sway to her hips, a subtle shift of her shoulders--indistinguishable, she was sure, from beneath the shapeless mass of the blanket--she paused just in front of him. 

In the dim moonlight, he skewed an eyebrow, looking down at her, something in his gaze flickering briefly.  Dampened arousal?  Embers of banked desire?  She couldn't tell, the glint replaced by his guise of nonchalant expectancy.

He hadn't moved, still leaning against the pillar, his hands clasped behind his body, stoic composure to the last, in spite of what she could feel mounting between them.  That same rush of thrilling current, an intensifying electricity that tingled through her senses, swelling and pulsating within regions of her body, a heady flow that seemed to flower from between her legs, rising with insistent demand, inciting a luscious spark between her breasts, making her feel intoxicated.  

She was mesmerized, the parody suddenly dying away, caught up in her own game, egged on by his gumption for daring her to share a single blanket--her makeshift mantle. 

He hadn't moved, his fingers still clasped behind him, except to bend forward slightly, letting her unwrap the two edges of the blanket, gripping a tattered corner in each of her hands. 

She licked her lips slowly, temptingly, holding his eyes, pressing herself, melding--lissome and supple--against his casually inclined posture.  The wintry wind was chill, making her catch her breath sharply, brushing across her exposed, naked flesh for the second until she laced her fingers about his neck, holding onto the corners of the woolen blanket, anchoring herself about his wide shoulders, enfolding each of them in the mantle, their intimate nest opposing the frigid aura of the winter night.  

"Is this what you had in mind," she intoned softly, tilting her head up to rest her cheek next to his, feeling to the coarse, tickling sensation of his beard, the rougher stubble, rub along her neck. "As far as sharing the blanket with me."  

For a moment he said nothing. She could feel this close to him, his uneven breathing match the hammering of his heart. The warmth of his breath in her ear caused a small tremor to shiver through her nerves, pimpling her skin. "I might have been hoping for something like this," he murmured cozily.

With only his light linen tunic, the thin felt trousers separating them, the heat shedding off his burly form enveloped the areas where they touched.  Her breasts lightly grazed against his chest, her belly and thighs delicately molded to the outlines of sinewy muscle, and she was acutely aware of the thickened, hardened slabs of pectorals, the rippling flexion of an abdomen many a Greek war-god would have been proud to sport.  

Bracing himself against the pillar, he shifted their combined weight a mere fraction, a tenuous movement of his hips, but she was all at once, attuned to another part of his body that had thickened with a rising heat--stiff between them, resting along his thigh and constrained by the fabric of his trousers.

He had broken their cheek-on-cheek contact to capture her lips in his own, a soft, sensuous play of tongue, nibbling her lower lip, moist and suckling, as she tipped her head back, exposing the graceful line of neck and throat.

Senses swimming, she felt like she was drowning in the luscious exhilaration of his mouth upon hers, the way the angles, plains, of his physique seemed to blend flawlessly to the rounded contours of her own.  His hands, underneath the veil of their shared blanket, were moving to embrace her, draw her even closer than they already were--body to body.  

His hands...gods his hands.  She had yet to feel their callused strength conform to the mold of her quivering body. Inhaling harshly, the arctic air a stream of pristine gelidity, she was aching and taut with desire, every fiber of her nerves, the pores of her skin alive and burning with arousal, feeling his teeth worrying along her neck, his tongue tracing some wondrous design in the hollow of her throat.  

Her mind was trying, vaguely, to recall what thing of dire importance she needed to tell him, lulled by the exquisite fire his lips and tongue were creating, following the graceful elegance of her sternum to nuzzle the valley between her breasts.

The echo of glacial wind through the hall swallowed her soft moan. Gods, why wouldn't he touch her with his hands, yet. She could feel them hovering, underneath the blanket, near the lovely curve of her lower back.

Hovering, but not touching to encircle that area where the small of her back flowed into the swell of her hips.  In the back of her mind, a realization dawned, cutting, about why he'd had his hands clasped behind him for so long, against the granite colonnade.  A _cold, granite colonnade. _

Her eyes flying open, spurred to abrupt action by her belated comprehension, his progress of quick, light kisses tracking the heavy, proud curve of one of her pale, areola-crowned breasts ceased simultaneously when she inhaled sharply. Anticipating her move, Maximus straightened hastily, clutching her in an iron, ice-cold grip that shocked the sensitized skin of her back as she tried to wiggle away from him, trapped by the imprisoning blanket.

Squealing like a clouted dog, she yelped out, "You bloody bastard!"   

Getting immersed in a winter river couldn't have caused her to shiver more, freezing her to the bone with a chatter of teeth, continuing to curse him with every creative expletive she knew, while he laughed helplessly, gasping through his full-blown mirth, " That was for the snowball!"

"You deserved the snowball!" she bit out, her jaws clicking together audibly. He was merciless in his humor, chuckling unendingly, his frigid grip about her waist, unrelenting, as she tried to knee him, stomp on a foot, anything to break the torturous sensation of his cold fingers upon, what had been, her very warm skin. Her endeavors proved unsuccessful, the range of her motion inhibited, trying to retain what scant trace of her dignity she possessed, refusing to drop her hold on the blanket edges, her fingers and the mantle still entwined about his neck 

She resolved to sink her nails into the back of his neck instead, hearing, with vindictive gratification, his laughter drop off, ending in a hiss of stifled pain.  

Not moving his hands, which were at least gradually thawing from icy-cold to merely..._cold, he articulated stiffly, "Are you turning a new leaf, Nemhyn?  You usually take the higher ground in this sort of contest--forgiveness rather than feeding fire with fire."_

Her dark scowl bore into Maximus' taunting, gray-shadowed gaze.  Between gnashing teeth, and a voice vacillating from laughter to fury, she said, "After all of these years, Spaniard," sinking her nails deeper into the skin of his neck, "and your experience with women, haven't you realized the myth of the gentler sex was just that--a myth?" She hadn't quite drawn blood, watching his suppressed grimace. 

In his favor, he did follow his own advice more often than not. It had taken him a while to learn better, drawing his lesson, as he'd once explained to her, from having spent a lifetime breaking in horses.  One didn't pacify a spooked, infuriated mare with the sting of the lash and the punishment of hobbling.  A good trainer, he'd explained in that deep, rumbling tenor, gentles her with food, and slow, gradual caresses.

He was starting to do the same thing, now, among this mystical, timeless moment of wintry chill, glacial wind, and spellbinding night.  "There's no need to be vicious in proving your point," he tried to whisper in her ear, making it an endearment, but she moved her face away from him just enough, glaring into his eyes.  There was a dim glimmer of gentle amusement across his visage, softened by the moonlight, despite her nails digging near permanent scratch marks into his neck.

"About the gentler sex, I mean," he intoned placidly, soothingly.  His voice, something about his voice always snared her when he spoke like this. It sent an entirely different kind of shiver along her spine, prickling the hairs at the back of her neck.

Speaking of caressing, his hands--which she had nearly forgotten about, having warmed sufficiently to almost be the temperature of her own body--began tracing a spiraling pattern from her lower back, moving with a tantalizing slowness, toward the front of her lower abdomen.  Thick fingered, and strong, they moved with the gentle pressure a musician would apply to the strings of his favorite harp.     

Fondling, kneading the soft skin of her belly, his fingers skirted with lazy purpose around the willowy, firm concavity of her navel, carrying on downward with delirious intent.  

Before her mind could reign in the natural response of her body, her breath escaped from between rapturously parted lips in a quiet sigh, her nails having relaxed their gouging pressure unwittingly, tangling in the coarse, thick waves at his nape. Their already intimate vicinity became a fusion of melding extremities, one of his hands, palm flat and most definitely warm, having transported itself to the lush, ripe abundance of her upper thigh, bringing Nemhyn against him, the felt trousers a single barrier between the evidence of his own desire, moving her hips against his, her heel hooking around one of his calves.  

So close to him, it was impossible to hold onto the irritation she'd been feeling, thinking, her lips and teeth catching the roughened skin of his neck, nipping soft, tender, it was unfair that a man, could be so...beautifully captivating.  There was a primal simplicity to his lovemaking, an exemplification of his spirit's essence rendering itself in every aspect of his life, his actions.  

It was not to say he had no complexity of being.  For all the physicality of his presence, his mind and his emotions were those of an artist and thinker. Yet, in spite of the demise and betrayal he'd endured over the years, the prestige he'd won back under a different name, an inadvertent duty to an island and an auxiliary unit of horsemen from the eastern steppes, Maximus'-Artos'-abiding loyalty, the expectation of steadfast trust he endowed upon other persons, never died.  

Perhaps, before his tenure as a slave, he'd hardly been blind to the flaws of men, though not quite conceiving of ambitions which could break oaths of friendship, ties to one emperor over another.  She hadn't known him then, only the bitter essence of the survivor he was after he'd recovered from his violent encounter with Commodus.  What had grown out of that shattered, disillusioned shell of a man was a new persona retaining bits and pieces of the old--shards of glass or gold--enkindled and refined into a harder, sharper, clearer, and more discriminating quality.  He was evolving, growing into a new, as yet, not fully realized power--shared between Batrades, prince of the Royal Iazyges, and key British nobles--sometimes aligned, others times in contention with Roman interests.

Her skin where his hands kneaded, sure and strong, was almost a literal blaze of exquisite stimulation. Pinching softly, caressing, stroking with ardent fervor, he cupped the bountiful glory of her breasts as he would delicate jewels, his lips worshipping with tantalizing, moist warmth and teasing breath, each nipple until she thought she would go mad with wanting.  Her breath would come in a desperate, reluctant gasp, and he would edge off, the bristly feel of his beard tickling her neck as he journeyed with patient intent--tongue, lips, and the light nibble of teeth his eager travelers--taking her lips in his with passionate restraint.  All the while, one hand wandering to tangle in her hair, loosing itself in the unbound mass, combing the curling strands so that a feverish tingle spread from her scalp all the way to her toes, a tremor of pleasure jolting through the sleek, sinuous lines of her arms, belly and thighs. 

She heard him whisper, once, in a shuddering, desire-drugged voice, incoherent almost, something about the place she inhabited in his heart.  The comment staggered, got mumbled into another kiss as the callused fingers of his other hand, beneath the blanket still binding them against the pervasive chill of a winter's night, brushed lightly, slowly, up along her thigh--unspoken permission to seek the sanctity of women's holy magic, the warm, most folds of soft fertility, and vessel of her own desire. Her arousal, the feel of his fingers running along a firm, quivering sinew of her inner thigh, transformed her legs to shaking, melting puddles of collapsing support.  He was like a sculptor, softening the clay of her body with the water's of desire so she would--they would--mold into the timeless embrace of intimate carnal harmony.

Nemhyn would have opened to him then, gladly taking him into herself, but for the fact she was still gripping him around the neck, grasping at his hair, holding onto the mantle's corners simultaneously. And so, there was little she could do as far as trying to free him of his own simple garments, the woolen blanket their singular defense against the courtyard' ambient night and winter enshroudment.  Restricted and restrained from letting her own fingers wander with free abandon, her lips incite the same fire, about a body whose muscled thickness, ridges of sinew and flat slabs of honed power were layered over the symmetry of arms, thighs, abdomen, neck.  The essence of masculinity transformed into feral beauty--the roughness of his skin, spread thin over deltoid and bicep, scarred from numerous campaigns, the delightful indentation of the joining where obliques led down to the sculpted confluence of hip, to thigh, and--

Her sigh was one of frustration, echoing into the cold silence about them, as she tried to lift herself, yearning, pressing even closer than their already entwined posture allowed. He'd been teasing at soft bits of her skin along her neck, the sounds of his kisses tender, the trail of moisture his lips left clashing, warm, with the cool gust of air down the corridor, scattering flakes of snow against stone floor and walls. Her own mouth was fast in the disordered, wiry texture of his hair, her knee, wrapped around his leg like ivy around strong oak, rising higher as his fingers stroked, brushing, feather light, further up the inner aspect of her thigh toward the desired goal.  

Hearing her deep breath, he echoed with a heavy, ragged sigh of his own, dragging his lips reluctantly from her neck for a moment, studying her face searchingly--gray irises languid, darkened with arousal and keen attraction.   The strong, rugged line of his jaw, robust plains of his cheekbones and deep-set brow were bathed in the courtyard's pearlescent luminescence. 

In the black and white, glistening kingdom of winter's night, moonlight's pallor illumined his skin to a dusky ivory, the dark brown hair, with the contrast of the pillar behind him, taking on the sable tones of the skies above. A dusting of snow blew over them once more, catching in the moonlight, shimmering, a dazzle of frosty crystal and ice-captured moonbeam.  The loose flakes caught in the tousled waves of his hair, his beard, on his lips, beading as they melted from body heat, creating a gloss of dewy iridescence.  He'd likened her to some arcane goddess of winter realms, yet he was the one, who at that instant, entranced her with a boreal beauty--a creature of myth, or timeless legend--a northern deity wandering the world of men at night, leading his host of frost wraiths and dire-wolves across frozen plains--harkening back to a lost age when the world had been locked in an eternal millennia of winter. 

Pressing his lips together briefly, he seemed to sample the liquid evidence of frozen particles, smearing a shimmering dampness across his mouth, bading her to reach up, lean the full weight of her body against him, and sample with her own tongue. Taste where the evidence of loose snow, the purity of highland streams, had scattered across his lips, his skin, the short, bristling softness of his beard.

The hand at the curvature of her lower back was pressing her with firmer insistence. The urgent, throbbing heat between his loins, turgid, as his legs buckled, using the column behind him for leverage, lifting her hips, grinding them together so that she clutched at him, a breathless gasp expelling against his neck.  

"Our sleeping quarters," he tried to get out roughly, almost begging, the last half of what he said muffled by the way he buried his face into her hair, his teeth and lips moving along the exposed line of her neck, an intoxia of nibbling and sweet kisses.

Her mind was trying to hold onto what she had intended to impart earlier, before the deliberate weaving of passion, a solstice spell, had caught each of them up in the clamoring head-long rush of dizzying sensuality.  Trying desperately to ignore his fingers, still methodically stroking along her thigh, lightly brushing--tantalizing--never fully exploring the aching hollow of her own need. 

"Ye-," she garbled the word, groaning, burying her face in his neck as she clutched harder around him, her breasts crushed against his chest, drowning in the rhythm of his hips moving, slow, subtle, lifting her against him.  She could have cursed him for having the presence of mind to put on trousers before he'd come out to look for her just then.  The textured material of the felt along the sensitized skin of her inner thighs, the one barrier between them from immediate fulfillment, was also the one thing that grounded her mind for a piercing second of clarity.   

"Was that a yes," he whispered desperately into her ear before assaulting her lips with ardent zeal.  

Incoherently, she almost sobbed out, reluctant and regretting, "Not--," gasping.  His fingers had slipped, gentle and delving, into the cleft of her womanhood, exploring slowly, the moist folds of her own arousal.  "Not yet," she said.  He lifted his head from where he'd been licking, biting at her earlobe, puzzled.

"This war," she forced out, pulling in air to steady her utterance. "This war," she repeated, firmer, steadier, though still a breathless rush, "needs to stop."

The only thing that did stop, in that instant, was the exquisite, circling bewitchment his fingers had been creating down between her legs.  Nemhyn smothered a cry of aching disappointment as he withdrew his hand, not un-gently, but, she could tell, with a deliberate motion acknowledging her words. 

The familiar crinkle forming between his eyebrows was evidence of a growing perturbation, looking down at her, vexation shadowing his eyes.  "You don't think I know that?" 

She could feel that invisible, instinctive wall, a proverbial distance he was retreating to within himself, though he hadn't broken their entwined embrace.  Nemhyn set herself about to seeing he wouldn't flee--figuratively or physically--any further than necessary when he heard the rest of what she had to explain.  

"I think, Maximus...Artos," she murmured, trailing a finger along the curve of his jaw, an inexplicable emotion rising up, almost choking off her undertone,  "you know. I think you do not believe you have the means to make it end."

Tracing up from his chin to cheek, unshaved stubble grainy to her touch, the moist droplets of melted snowflakes trapped by the thicker portions of his clipped beard left a glistening track of water across his skin, where she paused a single finger upon his slightly parted lips.

She refused to let his gaze slide away from her, holding his eyes unwaveringly, deep and incisive, trying to communicate her imperative through more than just words or voice.  "Those Picti prisoners should have been watching their flocks in lowland pastures for winter, making sure their cattle were getting sufficient fodder, repairing the thatching of their homes.  Not...not partaking in an ambush, especially against obviously outmatched, armed and armored soldiers.  They're accustomed to hoes, sickles, rakes and plows; not sword, shield, and lance."

There was nothing accusatory in her tone, keeping her low voice mild. He let her continue, though she felt him prodded to say something. Her finger upon his lips, her words, were his inducement to hearing her out. 

"Listen to me carefully..._Artos," mindful to use his earned name, an entitlement of honor, status and command. "Early in the spring, maybe two or three cycles of the moon after the battle on the Douglas, a host of twenty-seven men came ashore from Hibernia. They arrived with arms, well-crafted weapons...nobility to be sure, and they offered their services to Beinne Briot--the Caledonian King."_

Nemhyn, looking up into the gray-shadowed depths of Maximus' eyes, saw his interest flare, pondering.  He grasped her finger gently, removed it from covering his mouth.  "His son was slain in that last engagement...along with the flower of their trained army," he said. "I don't suppose you can blame him for hiring outside mercenaries until they can replenish the numbers of their military."

"His eldest son," Nemhyn corrected softly.  She saw him register that for a moment, his forehead still furrowed, more in thought than with undue concern.  After a beat of winter-hushed silence and the incessant, whistling draft of chill air down the hall, she said, "His youngest, single surviving son is held, this moment, under guard in the infirmary.  His only son, and heir."

Watching him blink, three rapid successions of lids, his gaze dropped an instant, staring out to the dark world of snow and bare trees of the courtyard around them, before finding her own again.  Drilling her through with a piercing astuteness, orbs suddenly bright in this nighttime world of opalescent splendor and glacial ambiance.

"My key," he said suddenly, definite and assured, "to initiating a truce.  How did you find this all out?"

"He's young," she replied evenly.  "You were right about his pride and his arrogance.  You were also right about his shame.  He wouldn't let any of the army physicians touch him--not even Publius. It took two hours for me to convince him I wasn't going to cut off his leg--what normally would have been done amongst his own people.  The advantage of classical medicine," Nemhyn stated ruefully, "hasn't filtered this far north of the Antonine yet."

"I suppose," she added with a sly glint and a quick grin, "it helps being a woman, too.  I told him what an impressive scar his wound would make when it was sutured up and healed--something to show to the ladies of his father's dun--and a great mark of a warrior amongst the men."

"I wish you'd served in the _Adiutrix when I was first a standard-bearer," he complained, mimicking a sullen tone.  "It would have made my time in the hospital so much more entertaining.  You just don't get the same treatment from male surgeons and attendants."_

She laughed, sincere and exuberant, but quickly fading, as she explained, soberly, the rest of how Beinne Briot's youngest son allowed her to finally repair his wound, bearing through the pain with stalwart fortitude.  Explained how the young man--coming of age into his fifteenth year--suddenly broke down and wept, for shame at the loss of old men and boys--all of humble origin collected from villagers serving his father's lands.  Others had been fellow sons of Caledonian nobility--too young to fight earlier that year along the banks of the River Douglas.  The young prince had been goaded into exacting vengeance, despite obviously inferior weapons, armor, and skill.  One of the men of the Hibernian company relentlessly insinuated, for months, how cowardly and thin the blood of the Picti peoples had become.  Weak hearted, weak warriors, their shame would carry over to future generations unless justice was sought.

Hence, Beinne Briot's youngest son, with the fervor of youthful pride and insult done to his native heritage, sought to correct the mistaken Hibernian--leading a rabble of old men and gangly adolescents into a doomed attempt against powerful horsemen of the eastern steppe, and hardened, disciplined legionnaires.

"None of that will matter to the eyes of a prisoner-tribunal," Maximus intoned, gruff, his habitual martial alertness fading the vestiges of sweet tenderness and sensual allurement. "The legionary commanders are going to want him executed as a barbarian insurgent."  There was no small amount of contempt to his voice.  

"Hold him as a hostage. There are plenty of chieftains south of the Wall who would take him for the seven year period to ensure a truce," she said, the sobriety of their converse over-riding the intimacy of their embraced posture, wrapped in each other's arms.  His hands were chastely upon her shoulders now, her own, still clasping the corners of the woolen blanket, once more about his neck.  "And insist," she added, "that the Hibernian party go back to their own shores." 

That brought a full-fledged frown to his brow, skeptical and glowering, his gut reaction protesting her advisement.  "Beinne Briot _might listen to our proposal...we have his son." She caught the thickness in his voice--momentary, but noticeable.  Almost hearing his words unspoken--__and a father will do anything to defend the life of his son.  He cleared his throat harshly before adding, "What makes you think the Hibernians will listen to an offer from a British legionnaire or a Sarmatian auxiliary as far as a truce?"_

"They will if it comes from you," she asserted.  The words carried into the stillness, the moaning wind fading to a mere shift of frosty current, seething with the wisps of snow, undulating like trails of mist, across the open space of the garden.

His hands dropped from her shoulders, not pushing her away, but a wary light falling over the plains of his facade.  When he began to shake his head in denial, she adamantly continued, "You carry the blood of Cuchulain, Maximus--a hero of their people.  They will see that and they will listen to you in a way they will listen to no other emissary.  It is more than they would do for any British noble or Roman officer."

His agitation was growing with every word she spoke, his eyes falling away from her face as he looked up into the star-strewn darkness of night, swallowing hard, and focusing on the snow covered awning glistening in the moonlight above.    

"Listen to me," she insisted, urgent and soft, but clear into the frosty air, her hands leaving his neck to encompass his face, peer into his eyes, draw his attention back.  "Don't...do not turn away from what is your gods' given right--_Artos."  Conviction made her voice resonate down the corridor of the colonnaded hall._

A flickering lucidity sparked in his expression when she said that name.  "You suffered once for not accepting the duty and leadership vested in you by an Emperor until it was too late. Do not repeat the same mistake."  He winced, but she held his face between firm hands, not letting him escape so easily, despite the fact he could have overpowered her with simple brute strength. Not without a struggle, of course--she was strong for a woman, and hardly a delicate slip of frail femininity. 

It was a measure of his respect--and his love--that he humored her, however, allowing her to lean closer to him, tilting her chin up slightly to still hold his gaze.  His denial of her words was sorely obvious in his eyes, though, and rather than looking away from whatever truth he saw reflected upon her visage, he finally settled for simply shutting them.  As though he could shut out the exigency of what she said.

"Oh, my heart," she murmured softly, tenderness imbued upon her voice, her sincerity--a guileless appeal, reaching out to him in a way no other woman ever could before her. "Listen to me, please," she entreated, a susurration but a hair's breadth from his lips.  

He made no move, his hands gone slack at his sides.  He did not he push her away, though, as he once might have done--a year and a half ago.  She could hear his quiet, even breaths.  "Maximus…_Artorius," she whispered into the winter's silent night.  "Those men--the Hibernians-- will listen to you for the same reason the Sarmati have grown to follow you so devotedly; for the same reason Roman legionnaires do not question your command as a prefect of twenty-five hundred horsemen, in spite of what they see as your obscure origins.  For the same reason," she pursued in her low undertone, "the British nobility south of the Wall vests you with an authority and respect they have traditionally reserved only for their own chieftains."_

He'd opened his eyes, at long last, to study her with that endearing look of keen vulnerability. That expression of yearning unvoiced, not seeking reassurance, or guidance--simply an affirmation of a truth he had never been fully able to accept in his own character when looking into the mirror of self-reflection.

This was a solstice though--not a time to hide from truths, nor escape from the inevitable duty of power.  And he had never shirked duty.  That simple fact was why he'd almost died in the Arena nearly two years ago.

"To the Sarmati, you are their god incarnate--the wielder of the Chalybee blade, leading the Dragon standard Batrades bears, to victory and glory, so long as the cause you serve is a just one, and done in the name of peace."

She was not sure, as she elaborated, when that disconcerting Otherness began to absorb her sense.  It was a strange thing, something she had felt a time or two before, a perception of dislocation within and outside of her mind and body. A gradual hyperawareness of her surroundings coinciding with the internal rhythms of her pulse, the exchange of ice-tinged air in her lungs, the muffled fall of individual crystalline flakes settling upon cold granite, disturbed from the high branches of the trees, floating down to catch and melt in her hair, or upon Maximus' skin.  The scintillating sharpness of winter starlight, high above in the blackened heavens, shining across distances too vast for her mind to fathom.  The way the starlight caught the man's eyes before her, perceived in some organic space of his brain, simultaneously interpreted by his more evolved senses with an awed awareness of cold, icy, coruscating beauty.  

"To the Romans," she whispered, trying to focus through the schism of her perception, "you are the intermediary between the legions and wild horsemen from the steppe, Picti barbarian, and British chieftain."

He was studying her with an intent gaze, somehow picking up on the stirring in her eyes, her voice, perhaps discerning the same thrumming swelling from the imperceptible shifting of layered earth beneath the foundations of the flagstones and snow-veiled soil.  Earth, frost soaked, nourishing, even in the midst of a winter-locked land, burrows of ancient root systems, embedded in the interminable, dark fecundity of dirt, springing up to reach with age-weathered trunks and a jointed latticework of limbs, to claw at the infinite, star-clad sky overhead like the talons of some monstrous beast from a lost myth.  

With the sudden siege expanding her awareness beyond simple human perception, she could feel the kinship animals--people--shared with those trees. Humans were very like these noble vestiges of wooded growth, hibernating in their winter sleep, a bridge between the infinite, the arcane, and the mundane temporality of life.  

"To the tribes south of the Wall," she uttered solemnly, her voice permeated with the essence of the northern wind wailing softly through the polar heights of deserted mountain passes and blizzard-encased, highland vales. "You are the Defender of Britannia. They have all chosen you, acknowledged you as the victor, the commander, a wolf among lions, the lord of the wild hunt."

Somewhere, in the blurry perception of Nemhyn's separate awareness vying with this glamour of Other pervading her sense, the woman could feel his eyes smolder, blazing with steely suspicion, recognizing the Thing taking over her being--the comforting flesh and blood matter of his lover. 

Nemhyn, separate and herself, surfaced from that hazy, Immortal possession momentarily, saying, "And they will listen to you, all of them--Roman, Sarmati, Picti, and Hibernian--because you are the Winter King," her voice entirely human, entirely her own for one moment more.  Swaying under the strength of the solstice-enchantment, she bit out before succumbing to the overwhelming flood of Immortal vitality running through every pore of her body, "Don't fight it."   

The energy that surrounded, encompassing, connecting herself to Maximus, flowed between humans to winter-stripped trees, pulsated with the same thrumming essence of sap through the limbs of the mighty oak and fragile, sapling elm. She heard him dimly argue with stubborn defiance, "I have no claim to royal authority," before losing her self to the fleeting rip-tide invading her mind and soul. 

A whirlpool diffusing through the world, that puissant synergy united the universe, the great seas connecting disparate pieces of land, breaking inroad with the force of tide, wave, and river inlet. Unseen currents swirling beneath murky ocean depths, warmed vast land masses, and swept over mountains, plains, forests, field and desert, rising to the heavens and soaking the limitless boundaries of earth with rain, sleet, snow and sunlight. An ephemeral web spanning, spinning the threads of all living things, elemental power of glacial, ice-clad night was the cyclic turning of the seasons--to become the sun-warmed exposure of verdant meadows and flourishing crops in summer.

This intrinsic spirit of death and life fed the wind-hushed sonority of Nemhyn's voice. "You, Artos, Great Bear--the king of the winter country beyond the gales of the polar kingdom--have proven yourself worthy and more than worthy of royal authority.  _Cailleach Beare you named this woman, in whose blood runs the sovereignty of my island. __Brigantia.  _

"I, the veiled one of winter, invoke you, Great Bear, to take your place at her side--Defender, Consort, and King."

Somewhere, in a distant corner or her mind, Nemhyn retained a faint hold on her dim faculty, the spark of her own measly awareness before the multi-layered perception of divinity.  Her hands guided his face down, slightly, so she might brush her lips softly against his forehead. 

"For the knowledge that resides in the seat of men's reasoning," she murmured, kissing him lightly, the motion a blessing of initiation, an incipient budding of inner-radiance taking root within the soul of both their minds, lending the nature of a seedling thrusting with interminable persistence through the barrier of dirt to the bright sunlight of creation and inspiration. "That you may guide with the wisdom of the antlered Ancient One, who is both Lord and Victim of Winter's wild hunt."

Her hands moved from encircling his cheeks, still grasping the folds of the blanket, sliding down the front of his powerful chest. Moving down to the edge of his linen tunic, she lifted the loose, untucked edge covering the top of his trousers, her fingertips tracing lightly up the a contracting ripple of abdomen when the icy bewitchment of winter's cold zephyr basked the bare skin of his exposed torso.  

As she had done to his brow, she proceeded--mortal Nemhyn possessed of immortal awareness--partially bowing her neck, to grace the area where his heart strove strongly to beat, with the petal-softness of her lips. "For the intuitive sentiment said to exist in the realm of men's feeling," she whispered clear and low, straightening to look into his eyes, not letting his shirt fall just yet, her palms resting warm against the surface of his skin, the thud of his heart palpable to her touch. "That you, as the giver of thy flesh in the season of sacrifice, gain insight into the hearts of men and women, alike.  Teaching as you learn, yourself, that love, in all of its incarnations, is neither a gift earned nor a favor gained, but a giving and receiving, freely flowing like the spontaneity of a child's conception in the womb of mother's sustenance." 

"I've known love," he asserted, his breath harsh and uneven, responding to her touch, his night-shadowed gaze flickering with a rising intensity. 

"You have," she agreed with a sigh.  "You do." She could almost see, sense with her mind's vision, the radiant fountain of energy, what had started as a gradual sensation of warmth behind his eyes, brimming from her kiss like the well-spring of creation's cauldron, overflowing to pour with sparkling electricity, jolting from the gate of his mind, tracking down to where her palms rested on the firm, corded tautness of his bared chest. 

Her hands seemed alive with that continuous, tickling current, sliding over his skin, spread even across the curving, inward symmetry of a strong rib-cage, the gradual indent where muscle overlay bone beneath the grainy-smooth texture of a man's flesh, keen to her dancing fingers.  The hammering of his heart echoed a throbbing rhythm that seemed to drum through the ground in pulsing waves, climbing from underneath her feet. Running up her legs with a resplendent shudder of power, the radiant fountainhead of warmth unfurled in her lower belly with an efflorescence mirroring that stream of inner-light blazing through Maximus' sense.

Of their own accord, her grazing hands slid slowly across the light, curling down of hair on his chest, flattening over pectorals, treading through the trail of short wisps that thinned toward the depression of his navel.    

Her fingers traced the rim of his umbilicus.  And lower.  

She followed the direction of her hands, lowering herself graceful, supple, the contours of her body shifting upon his, embers blazing to full-blown fire, fanned by the wind of immortal imperative driving human instinct. Where she touched upon his skin, the stream of inner-radiance flared beneath his flesh, flowing in her mind's other-vision, downward, coursing upward, from earth, through her, in a flux of inciting, enervated thrill. She felt the involuntary tremor of his skin contracting responsively, the rise and fall of his chest growing more pronounced, his breath catching when the edge of his tunic fell back over his torso in a hushed flutter of linen, where she knelt--suppliant to king--delicately untying the drawstrings of his trousers with practiced fingers.

His seizing inhalation was carried away by the moan of chill wind through the blackened, snow-glimmered courtyard. A gasp when she gripped the length of his manhood, his hands--which had been motionless before then, tangling in the unbound mass of her hair, spilling through his fingers, steering her face up to meet his eyes.  "You don't need to--," stumbling, choking on the words, silenced by the magic of other-light glimmering with tangible presence in the clouded, enigmatic wells of her gaze.  

There was nothing of Nemhyn in the esoteric smile she granted him, flitting across her visage before following upon the impulse driving her, to bestow obeisance with silken lips, soft tongue.  "The Spear of Lugh," she whispered between the entrapment her gentle, fondling kisses, the stroking of wicked hands and fingers along his swollen member.  "For his lightening springs from the most powerful source of all--that of procreation.  Like the strong oak, drawer of lightening down to earth, that drops its leaves before the barren spell of winter, so the Defender is also the Defeated.  Yet, the promise of returning warmth upon the rays of his blessed sun are evoked by the power of She who is both lady of life-in-death, the Crystal Queen of ice-riven pine and glacial mountain heights, who dances with the Lord of the Slain--the Winter King--upon the arctic currents of the diamond-studded heavens."

She heard him, distantly, cry out, something muffled and harsh, a sound in the back of his throat, leaning his head back against the granite pillar, inhaling immensely.  She knew she still wasn't quite herself. The freezing concrete of the flagstones, the snow surrounding where she knelt upon the unyielding surface, playing out her ministration of worship to the intimate source of his masculinity, ought to have been plying her with physical discomfort in the form of aching knee joints and winter-chilled skin. 

She scarcely felt either sensation, lost in the ebb and flow of that inner-radiance of brilliant, pulsating energy, welling up from undetected currents of the ground, spilling from the trees, cast upon the bathing light of moonglow, and frosty sparkling air. Her body, and his, were conduits for the founting reservoir, driving down from the source of his conscious thought, burning along a path lured by the seduction of her hands and lips upon his phallus. Alighting her vision, behind closed eyes, with a silver shimmer of warm prismatic colors, flooding through their veins, until the impossible brilliance of being, this hyperawareness, became too much for mortal flesh.  

A pressure was building, and suddenly, she felt his fingers, no longer moving with unconscious caresses through her hair, grasp, dig into her scalp.  His hips jerked, uncontrolled motion, a harsh expulsion of air torn from his lungs, "No!"  

Gently, but with firm insistence, he dragged her up as gracefully as he could, trying to keep the blanket about her shoulders, and simultaneously clutch at the waist line of his loose, felt trousers.  It was not gentle enough, his gesture causing her to stagger against him, eliciting a confused protest on her part.  "I'm sorry...did--," she tried to get out in a broken, shaking breath. "Did I hurt--," she muttered, reeling, unsteady, from the shattered enchantment of synergistic entrapment she'd woven about each of them unwitting, and nearly unaware.  

His eyes were dark, clouded by unresolved desire in the shadowed moonglow reflecting off the pillar.  "No," he answered, an odd heaviness in his voice, finishing securing the ties holding up his breeches. He touched her hair tentatively, a hesitant gesture, giving up when she moved away from him, only to pitch forward, so that he caught her, a scowl of worry darkening his features. Her legs were unusually numb, inexplicably weak as a newborn foal's. 

She was still shaking. She couldn't seem to stop, her hands tremoring like an old woman's.  Enfolded in his powerful embrace, she tried to hug the blanket around her, colder than she had been before, concentrating on not touching him too closely.  It was difficult after the unifying completion they had nearly experienced, feeling bereft and disoriented, the aches and discomforts she'd hadn't been aware prior to his unforeseen objection to immortal entrapment, attacking her ten-fold about her knees and lower back.  

She found herself avoiding his eyes, a trace of embarrassment beginning to flush along the paths where ardency had touched not so long ago.  Gods, her head felt foggy--wondering with a shrinking abasement, where some of those phrases she had uttered came from.  Wanting to shrink even further into herself when she remembered some of them explicitly.  

Taking a steadying breath, regaining some of her composure, she tried again, to break their embrace, clutching the folds of the woolen blanket like armor about her form when she backed away from him carefully.  She wasn't sure why, all at once, she was so discomfited.  It wasn't as though she were a virgin, nor that they hadn't made love before.  Something about this time...well, almost this time—the aftermath, was different.  The fabric of reality, the cold bite of winter air, the chill sky above, black with colorless, crystalline stars, the vaporous cloud of breath Maximus blew out randomly, observing her with a considering, unfathomable look, all seemed bent and out of place.  

She swallowed, _hemming awkwardly. "I'm...I'm going to head back to the bedroom," she quivered out between reluctant vocal chords.    _

Quick, unforeseen, he grabbed at her as she was about to turn to the gloom of shadowed corridors, colonnaded hallways at right angles to one another, surrounding the insular garden.  Catching her roughly at the elbows, then shoulders, he pivoted, backing her up against the grooved surface of the pillar this time, never giving her a chance to speak, pressing the full weight of his body upon hers, kissing her with a bridled tenderness, at odds with his churlish motion, the urgent need still obvious between his thighs. The assault he laid on her mouth, her lips, with teeth, exploring with tongue, firm, then soft and pliant, drinking from their impassioned embrace like a thirsty man seeking water, bristles of his beard, stubble texture, scraped across her skin as he drew out the play of ardent attack. 

Grinding his hips against hers, forcing her legs apart just slightly, the trousers, as before, did little to hide evidence of, what must have been, by now, a killing pressure from his arousal.  He finally released her from the extended onslaught of his lips and mouth, leaving her sagging against him, breathless, and feeling thoroughly bruised.  Strangely, she was devoid of words, a characteristic witty comment, some clever remark to lighten things between them.

He seemed to read her odd melancholy, not pursuing his advantage having her up against the stone column, but gathering her in his arms as though she were as delicate as a girl's glass doll.  Enfolding her, stroking back straggling locks of her stubborn curls, rumbling out with sweet candor, "By the Fates, Nemhyn.  If you're going to call me a king, then, tonight at least, let me serve you as one. In the great paradox of the world, being a warrior--even a leader of men--isn't so very hard compared to loving a woman.  Especially loving one like you."

That shattered the pall of pensive despondency clouding her feeling, snapping her chin up, directing the full brunt of her glare at him. "Whatever that's supposed to mean," she bit out reprovingly. Then breaking into a small chuckle, "I'm fine with you..._serving me.  Just don't ask me to walk all the way back to the sleeping quarters. My legs don't seem to be working properly at the moment."  Hearing his deep, rolling laugh begin to rise up, responding to her wry comment, she warmed in her heart, gladdened by the way his jocular grin lightened his features, brightening his eyes with an easy light.  _

"Ah, the things you ask of me," he expressed with an attitude of long-suffering forbearance, swinging her up, one arm around her shoulders, the other under her knees.  He evoked a laughing shriek from her when he stumbled, emulating exaggerated strain with a groan, lumbering a couple of steps down the hall.  

"By the three mothers, I'm not that heavy," she huffed out, indignant.  "You sound like you're hefting an overfed brood mare."

"Mmmm, maybe not a brood mare," he mused consideringly, successively striding along, effortlessly now, balancing her weight in burly arms. Just before turning down the juncture to their sleeping quarters, he paused in the engulfing darkness, bouncing her up and down in his arms a few times, like testing the mass of a flour sack.  "Closer to an overfed ewe, I think," he stated, definate, making her exclaim something vicious in protest, her words echoing into the darkness.  

Words swallowed by the kiss he placed upon her mouth, shouldering the door open, entering the chilly domain of their quarters.  Laughter swelled between them, shared caresses, and the re-awakened delight of rapturous ecstasy, the tattered woolen blanket falling to a heap on the floor, joined in short order by his tunic and trousers.

She was rendered nearly speechless with uproarious mirth when he threw her onto their bed, his growling parody of enflamed desire, as he succumbed to his own up-welling of guffaws, cursing the cold in a vapor of breath and a shiver, trying to get the brazier lit with a flint.  The warm, fiery glow spread throughout the room with an orange-gold coziness, allowing her to view his naked form in the dim incandescence, her admiration reflected in the whetted hunger glinting in his eyes, scorching across her body when she stretched, arms coming above her head, reclining languorously.  

"Well?  Are you waiting for a special acknowledgment?" she asked pertly.  Amidst the blankets, furs, and pillows, her hair was spread like a fall of autumn leaves, russet curls adorning pale-flecked skin, the drawn scar tissue of a dagger wound, running the length of her right thigh.  

Suddenly, with a motion as quick as an eye-blink, he dove next to her on the bed, making the frame jolt with a hideously creaking gripe, laughing deeply as she stifled a startled screech, trying to skitter away from his exploring fingers seeking out the ticklish areas of her ribs and lower back. 

They grappled like children, Nemhyn giving as good as she got--he had a spot just behind one knee that never failed to send him into rails of mirth, another in that ripple of muscle just between his lowest rib, and his hip bone. They were both breathless with glee, falling against one another, limbs entwined, their playful groping becoming the slower, sliding feel of flesh upon flesh, lips following suit, fingers tangling in hair, trailing down the length of body to seek out more intimate sources of stimulation.  

And that was how they spent the out-tide hours of early morning until the gray pallor of dawn. Tender caresses, whispered utterances of endearment, the arch of her back when he finally sought surcease, joining her in the fulfillment of woman to man, the cyclic rhythm of nature and the oldest dance in the world.  In the white-hot urgency of his climax, he gasped something in her ear, the words drowning in the melting, lush, throb erupting somewhere deep inside of her, engulfing her to the point of impossible pleasure, crying out with joyous bliss as she moved, taking him further into herself. 

His exultation was breathless, shaking when he finally fell atop her, slick with perspiration, their hearts hammering to a shared beat. He rolled so that suddenly she was astride him, the pale curve of her hips, the swell of thigh, rich fullness of her breasts, ripe in the repletion of womanhood, all lit like glowing alabaster in the orange-gold shelter of the room.  The simple sweetness in his gaze, the disheveled array of his hair caused her to sweep a finger across his forehead, bending to kiss him softly, shifting along his muscled length, cradled in the crevasse of his shoulder and chest.  

Winter King, veiled goddess of snowy places far from the world of men, raiding Hibernians, vengeful Picti, legions, medicine, could all fade away--look after themselves for the moment. None of that mattered, in the silent, frosty peace of a winter morn, the first rose-pink blush of an invernal sun breaking through the wooden slots of the shutters in shafts of washed out light.  Cuddled in the warm embrace of his arms, feeling his lips brush the top of her head softly, she looked up at him from beneath their shared blankets, realizing, as he started to speak--hushed and solemn, the deep rumbling of his muted voice a treasured sound to her soul--the only thing that did seem to matter, in that winter dawn, was this.  What they had, what they had found in each other, a precious thing, delicate as a new flower rising forth in the icy thaw of early spring, a rare and uncommon gift.  

A blessing to be savored, draw delight from, and as the years rolled by, give thanks to those forces, or fates, that granted such a gift upon the whim of life's twisting circumstance.  What was bestowed never came without a price, though, a sacrifice to an island at the edge of the Western Empire--Britannia.  A leader of men, defender of sovereignty, king-consort to the hidden queen of mist-veiled moors, towering highland peaks, purples and gray, heather-strewn fields.

None of that mattered, however, before the impossible, mortal sweetness his words invoked, filtering upon the imminent dawn-light. The only outlet for her rising of emotion, the expression of tears she angrily tried to stifle.  Not able to suppress the salty drops trailing slowly down her cheeks, as he went on, reciting in his gentle, clipped resonance: 

"_White in the moon, the long road lies,_

_The moon stands blank above;_

_White in the moon the long road lies, _

_That leads me from my love."_

She rose to sitting on her knees by his side, her hair rippling down her back, disheveled curls hanging over shoulders, attentive to keeping the pile of furs and woolen, fleeced hides about them to maintain warmth.  

He was lying back on a down-stuffed pillow, one elbow bent behind his head, his other arm resting, loose and relaxed upon his stomach. Gray irises clear with that lucid appeal, affection and love blatant as rain in an overcast sky, holding her watery gaze. Nemhyn felt her throat constrict, the simplicity of the verses redolent of a child's lullaby, as he continued in a hushed undertone.

_"Still hangs the edge without a gust,_

_Still, still the shadows stay;_

_My feet upon the moonlit dust_

_Pursue the ceaseless way."  _

A single tear spilled over from the corner of her eye, rolling, a dewdrop against the pale, even skin of her freckled cheek. When it came to bead at her lips, he reached a finger up, wiping the tear away with a gentle caress, his hand curving to the shape of her cheek, holding it there.

_"The world is round, so travelers tell,_

_And straight through reach the track,_

_Trudge on, trudge on, 'twill all be well;_

_The way will guide one back."_

A single, strangled sob escaped from her raw throat then, so that he sat up by her side, facing her from beneath their shared shroud of bed-linens, the light of washed out dawn beyond the shutters, crisp with the air of winter, dimmed feature, distinguishable detail to shadowed angles cast by the emanating glow of the brazier. He folded her to his chest, strong arms wrapped around the straight, proud curve of her shoulders, breasts bare against the warm, firm-rough feel of his skin. Clutching him around the neck, she wept into groove of his collarbone, giving full vent to the inexplicable sadness welling up, even when she ought to have been laughing in disbelieving happiness.  

_"But ere the circle homeward hies," he whispered into the veil of her unbound hair._

_"Far, far must it remove;_

_White in the moon the long road lies_

_That leads me from my love." _


	3. Upon a Winter's Dawn

**Maximus writes:**

_We greeted the dawn of that winter morning like First Man and First Woman, awed by the miracle of creation, and the freshness, the latent, unspoiled potential of the world around us. When she finally regained the composure to speak, her voice still filled with the sound of her sorrow, eyes glittering with moisture, as though they would spill over again in any moment, she cursed me soundly, her voice shaking with the measure of her emotion.  Cursed me, exclaiming no man had ever made her cry when she ought to have been laughing, and laugh when it was only appropriate to cry.  Cursed me, because she was not a woman given to tears, could count the number of times in her entire life—what was she then, bearing onto her third decade by that point—on one hand, one time over, she had ever indulged the luxury. At least in front of other persons.  When she had first miscarried at sixteen, when her first husband died in a hunting accident in her nineteenth year, her second child passing on not four months later, still an infant, suffering from a vicious winter's lung ailment; when she had nearly been dealt the worst fate a woman could fathom, risking her own safety unthinkingly, to foil the assassination on Albinus' life.  And to her shame, this solstice morning._

"_You can't mean what you're asking, Maximus," __she averred.  "__To be lovers," __she went on solemnly, taking my hands in hers, sitting across from me on that bed, in the pale light of that winter dawn.  "To be lovers, to acknowledge love," __she said gravely, "is more than most people are ever blessed with. But to ask for this--hieros gamos," —__the brogue of her accent flawless over the Greek—,"between us…," __and she trailed off, overcome for an instant._

_In the silence, she seemed to be trying to remember something from a long time before. I recall, how, as she found her voice again, after that moment of thinking, she was interrupted by a knock at the door.  My body servant, Evitri, asking if I was going to eat with the other officers in their headquarters across the fort, or if I would prefer to take a private meal with 'extra helpings of mulled wine, cheese, an extra bread loaf, and another plate of dried apples'.  _

_Most of the servants, the clerical staff of the British legions, were usually of British origin; hence, accustomed to their women exercising, for the most part, the same freedoms as men.  They were still careful to never be explicit about anything, not referring specifically to Nemhyn, but paying her the courtesy of discretion by implying they were aware of her presence, approved of it, in fact.  In any case, it was years until Severus' son would authorize marriage for more than just the officers of the legions, making unions between men and women legal to all levels of the military.  It went unspoken, but more common than not, that the vast majority of the men—whether legionnaire or auxilia, cohabited with some sort of a female companion.  _

_How the Empire expected a bunch of men in the prime of their youth to not find some release in the company of the opposite sex always seemed beyond the limits of reasonable expectation.  Whoring was common, often expected. It was not unthinkable, though, when some of the men—many barely sporting their first beards--didn't see their families for nearly two years, that a genuine affection could be fostered between native women and dislocated companies of soldiers far from their homes.  _

_Just the same, it was Nemhyn, on that morning, characteristic of her flippancy, who shouted out to Evitri that he might as well bring an extra platter since he seemed to be bringing extras of everything else. Nemhyn, then proceeding to ask, conversationally, after my flustered servant's wife, whom she had helped deliver of a child the summer just past.  Laughing, Evitri said the boy was as chubby as a mutton chop, and feeding all the time—so much so he was getting jealous of the fact the child was at his wife's breast more than him.  Nemhyn, whose sense of humor ran along the same lines as most of the men in a barracks, replied with a lighthearted quip that wet-nurses were hired for a reason, the sound of Evitri's answering whoop, coming from the other side of the door, echoing all the way down the hall._

_When we turned our attention back to the discourse at hand, her sorrowing disbelief—perhaps it had been shock—seemed to have dissipated.  "Too many blessings over not enough time; where treasures are too much, good folk know better than to touch," she recited, a child's proverb.  "For all of the dark hours of the last year," she said softly, like she was leery of unseen ears overhearing her words, "we have been so blessed…too blessed.  And I…I had so much already, have been favored by stars know what Fate in so many areas of my life, throughout the years—my family, friends, the Art…you," her grip tightening in mine.  "You were the least expected of them all."_

_"I have tried, my whole life, to give something of those blessings back.  It seems so wrong when we live in a world where few have so much, and there are masses having so very little…of even the most basic needs."  _

_I knew where she was going with this line of thought. "And you think by accepting my offer, you will throw off the balance of your blessings and your misfortunes?" _

_She must have heard the skepticism in my voice. I hadn't meant it to sound so caustic, but she snapped back with in impatience she only reserved for the profoundly idiotic: "Of course not," sniffing in that way women do when correcting men about their misconceptions._

_"Nemhyn," I said to her then, overriding her effort to speak.  "I would leave it for minds greater than ours, and deities far more powerful than us, to decide when someone falls on the side of Fortuna one too many times.  I only know you can live your life as correctly, or dissolutely, as you may, and somehow the good man can still suffer for his virtue while the depraved one gloats in his debauchery.  I'm not sure if I was an example of that, or I simply ended up stepping on the wrong side of my life's thread that day Commodus ordered the deaths of Selene and Marcus. Maybe I was the debauched one, who knows."  _

_I had a working theory, by this point in our relation, that the higher Nemhyn quirked her right eyebrow, the more inclined she was to throw water into the very neat, dry shelter of what she saw as my most recent delusion.  Her eyebrow was well above the level of the other one, indicating just what she thought of my last comment.  Whatever she believed, medicine was a line of work in which she had long ago, learned to discern the colorings of old grief in men's voices, and women's silent bereavements.  She had known her own losses as well, and she somehow understood, intuitively, saying nothing was often the most comforting tactic in allowing someone to work through painful associations.   _

_It was one of those reasons why I had grown to feel for her…love her as I had not expected.  The earnest expression across her beloved face, constant and steady, remained unwavering this time, facing the sudden torrent of words rushing past my mouth before I could stop them.  The inspiration of the moment, and I didn't fight it.  Eloquence, as Lucilla had so astutely pointed out to me, once, in those bittersweet years of our adolescent innocence, was not something inherent to my nature.  Selene had agreed, finding it refreshing, tired of listening to suitors who quoted awful epigrams from Martial. I tortured her with Lucan instead, some horrid passage of Magnus' wife, Cornelia, weeping for the fact he was sending her away to Lesbos during the civil wars of Julius Caesar.  Selene laughed at my effort, advising the next time I wanted to try and court a girl, it would be better to quote love poetry from Ovid—as though I had ever read love poetry in the course of my studies prior to the military.  _

_I used that one recollection, frequently, as a basis for comparing the women I had loved in my life, up to that point.  I would never have done such a foolish thing, reciting bad epic poetry, in front of Lucilla, at least not as that untried soldier I had been when we had first met—I think I was all of sixteen, my voice still cracking like a singer gone hoarse.  Selene, in her gentle, comfortable way, humored me, and allowed me the grace of expanding my domain of literary knowledge into the realm of equally bad love poetry.  _

_Nemhyn, as I recounted that memory to her once, during that first year of our relationship, walking along the chalky, wind buffeted cliffs east of Arbeia, in the sweet summer before that winter's morning, skewed the ever-predictable eye-brow at me.  Then chuckled, saying I did better when expostulating on Archimedes and his engineering feats, than trying to recite Latin poets—even if they were from Hispania.  I'd laughed with her, as we tried to out-do each other with even more revoltingly sentimental verses, until she grew serious, thoughtful, commenting on how Lucan's great epic, the Phrasalia, lent itself to parallels in the current state of the world.  The evils of civil war, the upheaval it causes in destabilizing the State, making borders vulnerable to attack and invasion from beyond the frontier.  A very Lucilla-like comment.  _

_What Lucilla wouldn't have pointed out was the chaos it also wrecks upon the peasant farmer, the sharecroppers, herders, hacking a subsistence off land that was barely arable, let alone, able to support livestock.  Causing famine and spreading disease amongst already compromised unfortunates.  _

_Nemhyn's line of work took her into very different circles than Lucilla would ever have exposed herself to.  Patrician classes of Rome were notoriously protective of their status, maintaining a strict separation between definitive societal strata.  _

_The upper class of Britannia was no less exclusionary—their lines having been influenced by the native stock of nobility, combining with the imported values of Roman elite. More true to the point, Nemhyn's family was highly eccentric, untraditional, in a sense that melded both Roman and British ideals of class, duty, and responsibility into an entirely new mold, lending a depth of compassion and non-biased judgment I hadn't experienced since the years of my childhood.  Even Marcus Aurelius, for all his wisdom as an Emperor, forgiving leniency as a man, had never shown such a fluid view of the world, of people's stations in it, as Nemhyn's family seemed to hold.  _

_That fluidity had allowed an auxiliary unit of horsemen from the steppes to adapt their own lifestyle, maintain their own unique customs, even in the face of Imperial Rome, forced to settle on an island in the distant Western ocean.  That same tolerance also opened a path to a man who had come to these shores possessing little more than the clothes on his back, and a status little better than an exiled, anonymous refugee.   _

_On that winter morning, in the chill light of a winter solstice dawn, before the season of vernal warmth hints the air, signaling the fruitful promise of imminent summer, I took advantage of that sudden eloquence and told Nemhyn what she meant to me.  First, through the child's lullaby my grandmother had sung to me as a child, after my mother passed on. The lady from Hibernia who had taken the name of Lacrima after she had come ashore to Hispania in her youth, escaping the aftermath of a great war, and the death of the fabled hero who had been her lover.  Her name in the Hibernian tongue—Fand--meant 'the beauty contained in a single tear-drop, fallen on a rose.'  Lacrima seemed appropriate.  _

_Nemhyn had known what I was asking in those simple verses; that I could not fathom being separated from her, even in the midst of a campaign.  Then, I tried to tell her, after, having her by my side, to know she was in the military camp, or the fortress only twenty-miles away, tending the hospital, or riding out into the countryside, administering her care to the true inhabitants of Britannia's common-folk, was more assuring than thinking of her two-thousand miles away, across an ocean, with a mountain range and a vast forest between us.  Whatever reluctant sovereignty she held as Brigantia—heir to her mother's title—she had long held divine prominence in my heart. She was the Queen of the Hidden Places, and she had chosen me—whether by providence or her own mortal reason—to be her King.  _

_Her father had once told me, trying to persuade me into assuming the command of the Sarmati, back in the early part of that year, just before thirty-thousand Picti—the Pretani—amassed into one confederation, streaming down, to breach the Wall at Onnum, that his own love for a woman had become his love for an island.  I had discovered no less than the truth of those words--my love for Nemhyn.  _

_Yet, no gift comes without a price.  We could not foresee, surrounded by the bonfires of a May Eve, swearing oaths binding our souls in the same way our hands were bound by a rag of silk, phrases older than mythic Atlantis, that went beyond our single lifetime, into many lifetimes, how those oaths to each other, to kin and homeland would be tested.   Even after word came, that summer, of Albinus' defeat—his imminent capture somewhere in Gaul, we could not fathom the full import of the words we spoke to one another, invoked by that winter solstice, and avowed within a sacred grove of oak and ash later in the spring. _

_What I did see, in my mind, on that winter morning, the spill of icy light shimmering through the windows, the impotent sun shining weakly as it rose above the eastern horizon, were the rays flooding across the fields and bluffs of barren, frost-strewn ground, catching the murky blues and ashen blacks of the Tay's watery expanse.  Huddled in blankets, fending off the cold—the tinder in the brazier having burned itself out hours before—Nemhyn opened my hand, twining her fingers with mine, bringing our enfolded palms to the place just above my heart.  _

_"I seem to remember at some point in the night, expostulating on how the heart is the intuition of the mind.  If that's true, Maximus, then you already know I could never deny you any part of myself you would ask for—least of all the treasure, and gods' grace, the blessing, of spending my years at your side," her voice catching. _

_How can I tell you the joy I felt, hearing her say that.  There was such a sense of rightness to her concordance, a completion I hadn't known I was lacking until that moment.  Her words would open a new chapter for Britannia ultimately, as they did for her—accepting the heritage of her mother's title. Brigantia—the lady of the people, protector of the land and her inhabitants, human and animal, patroness of city and countryside, the exalted one…the High One.  _

_Whatever mystical connotations there might have been to the title, her acceptance as my wife in the Beltain festival come the spring, they fell away before her chiding pragmatism regarding food and wanting to eat.  On that morning, I opened the door to Evitri's knock, two platters of food with which to break our fast a welcome diversion. Looking up at the heavy pinewood awning, I hadn't noticed, in the night, the holly sprigs adorning the entire frame, leafy green and shiny, red and white berries like pebbles of blood and snow.  _

_On that morning, we dove into the food with the appetites of youth, sitting on the bed beneath coverings of pelts, heavy wool, cuddled amidst goose-down pillows and linen sheets.  Winter King, Brigantia, Cailleach Beare, Lord of the Slain—the enchantment of a winter's solstice.  The magical lingering of that night didn't disappear completely, but it found extremely tough competition in the light of day, Nemhyn's lilting voice carrying into the air, discussing mundane things as we ate contentedly. The zest of desiccated apple slices and yellowed, hardened, vinegary-tasting cheese bade her comment on the welcome change fresh fruit would bring with the spring.  And she continued to entertain me with a lecture on how the heart, as an organ of the body, actually didn't appear to house any seat of emotion.  _

_"Popular thought of the ignorant masses," I'd replied back to her.  _

_She huffed out a breath of annoyance, rolling her eyes at my tone.  "Four chambers," she'd said, chewing meanwhile, naming some long-forgotten physician from Alexandria, years ago, had shown it worked like a pump, moving blood through its cavities.  Then she elaborated on the process of dissecting the heart, fortunate in the fact I had been soldier, and gladiator, and soldier again.  My propensity for tolerating her dinner converse would have foundered like an arrow-struck deer, otherwise. _

_I listened to her with interest, fascinated by her knowledge, having discussed aspects of military wounds with Master Galen long ago. Sword gashes to the upper left part of the chest were always more dangerous than to the right, the danger of loosing blood more rapidly, accounted for by the heart's proximity, tied in to her verbal treatise on pumping blood.  _

_Frankly, I just liked watching her, the blanket edge revealing a wonderfully sun-dappled shoulder—pale flecks upon even more pale skin.  Her hair caught the watery light of winter shimmering through the shutters, coils of her burnished tresses, scattering the shafts of rays when she shifted, a wealth of auburn-brown cascading over her neck, down the front of her frustratingly, blanket-concealed breasts._

_The way she moved her hand in a vague gesticulation, asking a question when I offered a comment on my own observance of military wounds over the years.  _

_It was those little details of her character, her demeanor, I would remember from that solstice morning, most of all.  The details that bring humanity, intimacy, to a memory, enlivening the image with the animation of life, so the mind sees the person of their heart, and not just the recollection of a vital presence their eyes once held in a slice of time. An isolated instant of icy beauty and glacial, black wind, snowy essence, wishing then, as I wish now, writing this, it could simply have remained so…timeless. _


End file.
